[Soc-coordination] Call for Projects & Mentors for Google Summer of Code 2012

[Asheesh Laroia]

On Wed, 7 Mar 2012, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:

> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 10:18:45AM +0100, Gergely Nagy wrote:
>> xx> Not sure if it'd be a good idea or not, but we've never really managed
>>> to collect and maintain a list of "easy hacks" that could be useful for
>>> Google Code-In and, more generally, to ease the access path to Debian.
>>>
>>> We've some technical support for it
>>> http://wiki.debian.org/qa.debian.org/GiftTag , but we never managed to
>>> encourage people to tag bugs and then to use the list of tagged bugs in
>>> any useful way. (And possibly the name "gift" is not really appropriate
>>> either...)
>>>
>>> Given that you're thinking anyhow to teams who might have GSoC-like
>>> tasks, it *might* make sense to also point them to the gift thingy and
>>> encourage them to tags bug accordingly.  But it could also have the
>>> disadvantage of diverting attention to two conflicting initiatives: GSoC
>>> planning and "easy hacks" tagging.
>>>
>>> I just wanted to mention this here, as a possibility, but I leave it to
>>> you whether it'd be a good idea to mention both things when contacting
>>> teams or not.
>>
>> This is a good idea, perhaps it would be worth an easy GSoC project to
>> make it more visible: modify the BTS, the PTS and whatever else we can
>> think of, to show gift tagged bugs more visibly. Also writing a few
>> guidelines on what kind of bugs are appropriate for the tag would also
>> help, something a bit more elaborate than what's on the wiki at the
>> moment.
>
> Actually, I thought a bit more about it, and it might be the case that
> what we actually want is getting in touch with people who already know
> how to collect "easy hacks" and bring wannabe contributors to
> them. Something that fits that definition is
>
>  http://openhatch.org/
>
> Asheesh (DD, and OpenHatch maintainer), do you see some interest in 
> connecting the dots among Debian and OpenHatch? In particular, we're 
> discussing how to encourage people to maintain a list of "easy hacks" 
> (bugs in the Debian BTS exlicitly tagged as such) that will make it 
> easier for people to start contributing to Debian.
>
> If there is technical work to be done, do you see any interest in a GSoC 
> project on the matter?
>
> [ for context, see the sub-thread started at
>  http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/soc-coordination/2012-February/001146.html ]

Hi all,

Sorry about the super long delay.

I think that, after watching use of OpenHatch for a few years, tagging 
bugs as 'gift' or 'bitesize' is okay, and something I can work to 
encourage within Debian. However, there's a whole ball of unaddressed 
social work that needs to be done: finding mentors, and getting mentees up 
to the level where working with them is actually fun rather than trying.

OpenHatch, for its part, has been branching out into in-person teaching 
events. Now that the university semesters are winding down, I expect we'll 
be putting more effort into the web app again. (-:

The initial thing that makes sense is getting those Debian bugs into the 
OpenHatch /search/ browsing interface. That can be done by writing some 
Python code in our "oh-bugimporters" Python package. I've filed this bug: 
https://openhatch.org/bugs/issue727

We've found that many visitors to the site are interested in browsing 
projects and communities first, rather than tasks first. We're tracking 
that transition here, and welcome contributors. (: 
http://openhatch.org/bugs/issue714

I'll be looking into these shortly-ish, weeks-to-months. I encourage 
people to join #openhatch on irc.freenode.net and our Devel list 
<http://lists.openhatch.org/mailman/listinfo/devel> !

-- Asheesh.