Summer of Code 2012/management/application

Question

Organization Name:

Answer

   Wikimedia Foundation

Question

Description:

Answer

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is a nonprofit charitable organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively edited reference projects in the world, including Wikipedia, the fourth most visited website in the world.

Question

Home page:

Answer

http://wikimediafoundation.org

Question

Main Organization License:

Answer

GPLv2+

Question

Backup Admin (Link ID):

Answer

(Rob Lanphier's link ID)

Question

What is the URL for your ideas page?

Answer

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2012

Question

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

Answer

irc.freenode.net #mediawiki (when too busy: #wikimedia-dev)

Question

What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

Answer

https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l

Question

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating?

Answer

We hope to expand the MediaWiki developer community, growing contributors for the long term. Secondarily, we want to sand some of the rough edges off of the MediaWiki reader, editor, and administrator experience.

Question

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

Answer

We have participated since 2006, with varying degrees of success. Generally, the software produced has made it to the prototype stage, and in many cases has given us a springboard to future work, but very little has immediately gone into production. However, several of the students have stuck around our community -- Yuviraj Pandian, Niklas Laxstrom, Jeroen de Dauw, Brian Wolff, Devayon Das, and Stephen Laporte have continued to contribute to the Wikimedia technical community. We've also strengthened ties with Max Semenik and Siebrand Mazeland, who were volunteer mentors for us.

Since 2009 we are also making stronger efforts to ensure that students' completed projects get merged into the trunk and deployed on Wikimedia sites. Currently, a few of our 2011 students have already gotten to that step, and three of our 2011 students are working on it. In the future, we'll be advising students to scope their projects smaller and to allot more time at the end for code review, merge, and deployment.

In the past, one challenge for our organization was that staff and volunteer time has generally been mopped up by the challenges of running an extremely high-traffic website, leaving us little time to work with students. We've scaled up our staff considerably since 2009. Specifically, we have a dedicated staffer who is serving as Google Summer of Code organizational administrator and who will ensure consistent mentor-student interaction.

We also used to use Subversion, which makes it hard to develop in feature branches. We're switching to Git, which will work better for these sorts of summer projects.

A full summary of our past participation can be found here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_Past_Projects

and

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:MaxSem/GSoC_analysis

Question

If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

Answer

We have participated in previous years.

Question

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

Answer

Not yet.

Question

What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible:

Answer

We have a fairly long list of available mentors that we'll be narrowing down in the process of student selection. We'll be looking for a combination of: proven collaborative ability and temperament, experience with the codebase, knowledge of specifically relevant MediaWiki components, and responsiveness to the students in the selection process will determine who gets paired with the students we select.

Please also see https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2012/management#GSoC_management_philosophy

Question

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Answer

Projects undertaken for GSoC by WMF are generally not in "mission critical" areas, but our mission to further "Free Knowledge" means we do care about education and mentoring. We will prevent student disappearance by checking potential availability during the application process, and through checkins from mentors and from the organizational administrator. Should a student start disappearing, our organizational administrator will personally reach out via multiple media to reestablish contact and discover and solve the underlying problem. Please note that we have good prior completion stats from a student point of view, and the real problem to solve is mentor continuity (see next question).

Question

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Answer

This year, we have attracted a fine set of mentors from the paid, volunteer, and staff communities. We believe we have enough redundancy to ensure good mentor coverage for up to 5 projects. Our organizational administrator will check for potential availability problems before the summer starts, and will check in with mentors as regularly as she checks in with students (see previous answer).

Question

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

Answer

As part of our application, we're specifically asking about how they plan to participate, and stating "We will tend to favor applicants that demonstrate a clear vision for what it means to be an active participant in our development community".

Question

Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here.

Answer

Semantic MediaWiki