Topic on Talk:Outreach programs/Life of a successful project

My personal experience has been that reporting on a daily or near daily basis is good exercise, especially for students working independently and / or remotely. In particular, more regular reports help:

• Identify work actually accomplished and try to get something done (reportable) on a given day.

• Provide good records of accomplishments when needing to summarize at project end for a postmortem, CV, blog, etc.

• Encourage good communication, give some peace of mind to the author as everyone knows they're working hard even if there hasn't necessarily been a deliverable that day, and allows the reader to promptly offer help in areas the author may be struggling with.
• Consolidate the author's thoughts on the problems and solutions of the day.
• Do a timeline and project status check.
• Practice quick, clear writing and thinking, especially useful for developers and / or nonnative speakers that must communicate ideas with others.

Of course, all of these are relevant for weekly checkins, too. I don't think the format matters so much. The author will figure out what is most useful. Once the author learns their value, these checkins can become quite rewarding for both author and reader.

That is good piece of advise, Stephen. We should add this to the page, Tony.

Generally teams decide for themselves what works best for them but daily/alternate day reporting has proven excellent in our past rounds. In my opinion it works better if the reports aren't being scribbled on a task/wiki page but the reporting happens by talking to the mentor directly. Via IRC or Hangouts or something similar. In the initial few weeks, the student tends to get stuck at every other step and talking to the mentor frequently will help them not be blocked for days at end. They generally pick up enough pace by midterm to work independently mostly.