So GCI 2017 has come to an end. Google will publish winners 31st of January.
We had 398 tasks completed 75 beginner tasks and a total of 540 students work with OpenMRS.
We had a some instances of tasks pending for more than 36 hours especially during exam periods. Plus a lot of the non beginner tasks were very specialized that needed the creator of the task to review and approve and when such person becomes unavailable, reviews take long.
We had really amazing students this year and some where surprisingly making @dkayiwa revise his java skills
This year we had a lot of non trivial coding tasks and these weren’t even lasting on the dashboard.
All mentors did great. Despite the unavailability at some point in time due to exams considering about 90% of my mentors are students, this really affected us. But we were able to pick up and made our students happy.
Being admin was tough. I made a lot of decisions, some good, some not so much and I had to learn the had way. And there were a few times I lost my temper . Also I didn’t realize being admin also means you have to mentor (reviewing tasks and providing feedback) among other things associated with being admin. Making volunteers organized without feeling bossed around and losing their zeal for volunteering was tough.
Will be writing a blog post about my GCI experience and a google docs with things learned and a summary of how gci went to help our future admins.