On 20/08/14 11:48, Quim Gil wrote:
For those interested in the process of proposing and accepting internship
projects, here you have a post mortem of this specific case:
On Tuesday, August 19, 2014, Strainu <[email protected]> wrote:
This sounds like a serious miscommunication before the GSoC project
begun. Something for the
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Mentorship_programs/Lessons_learned
page, perhaps?
Perhaps, but what is the lesson we need to learn?
The lesson to be learned here is not unlike what many teams could learn.
When someone creates a product specifically for a certain group of users
(in this case folks installing extensions) without actually knowing what
is useful to them (never even mind 'important' at this stage), there is
something seriously wrong with that process. This, however, doesn't
particularly reflect on Aditya, who simply did the project as it was
layed out; it was the folks guiding the project who should have started
the process of actually talking to the users about this well before GSoC
began, and continued it as part of the project itself.
So here, the GSoC project needs to have been set up better. Simply put,
you cannot reasonably expect random community members to carefully
review every single proposal or new feature, so where feedback is
needed, you need to go out and get it. The student is there to learn,
and probably will not know that, and that's fine because it's supposed
to be the sort of thing they're learning. The mentors may not know that
either, if product design and engineering aren't their things, so that's
not necessarily an issue either. But for projects that will affect
people outside the project itself, for projects facing specific groups
of users, someone along the line needs to know the importance of
discussion, of determining the user/developer/whatever needs before
engineering the product, and someone needs to give the guidance needed
to make sure the relevant discussions happen.
That's what needs to be addressed moving forward.
-I
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