Most software projects fail (for some definition of "fail"). Even for highly skilled and highly experienced companies and shops, most software projects fail. I'm not going to look up the Gartner and Forrester and Chaos reports this late on a Monday night, but google away.
GSoC is an investment that is not intended to have a short-term payoff. The fact that ANY GSoC code makes to production is fantastic. GSoC is an investment in the long term. It is intended to provide real concrete experience to promising students in real environments, including all the frustrations and annoyances that everyone on a software team experiences in the real world all the time. Schools simply do not provide that experience. Some fraction of those participants will take those experiences into the future of software development, to make real improvements, both to code and to process. Furthermore, considering GSoC solely in terms of benefit to Mediawiki/Wikipedia is short-sighted. Take a look at the organizations participating: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/projects/list/google/gsoc2012 . What would your opinion be if WMF were not on that list? On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 5:32 PM, MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com> wrote: > (Splitting this off from John's critique of ConventionExtension.) > > Hi. > > MediaWiki has participated in several (Google) Summer of Code iterations > now > (<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code>) and I'm wondering how > this > partnership program is evaluated. > > Whenever this program wraps up at the end of the (Northern Hemisphere's) > summer, I always sense a worrying amount of frustration and annoyance from > all parties involved. The projects are usually overly large and complex and > from what I understand, nearly all of the projects from Google Summer of > Code don't end up in production environments. If the projects are lucky, > they end up in a MediaWiki extension; if they're unlucky, they rot away in > a > code repo branch somewhere or behind a configuration variable set to false > by default. The end result being that: > > * the people who worked on these projects are frustrated and annoyed > because > they didn't get their code deployed [to Wikimedia wikis, a wide audience, > or > anyone at all in some cases]; > > * the people who mentored these students are frustrated and annoyed for > similar reasons; and > > * the people (end-users) who wanted to see these projects successfully > completed are frustrated and annoyed that these features still don't exist. > > So I'm left wondering how the cost v. benefit equation works out for this > program. How do you evaluate the program and whether MediaWiki ought to > remain a continued participant? > > And, of course, should MediaWiki decide not to participate in Google Summer > of Code in 2013, are there other [better] ideas for getting people involved > in MediaWiki development? > > MZMcBride > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
