I thought that we’d have final presentations on Talk and get to see a brief demo & summary of each project. It’s too late for that now, right? Can we do that next year?
Suggetions for future GSoC…
One-day Sprints. Have each student plan a one-day sprint on their project. The student prepares n/2 tickets (where n=number of GSoC interns) for their project that can be understood & completed in a half-day. These could be features, bug fixes, refactoring, documentation, whatever. Over the summer we have n one-day sprints. Each student touches every other students project, students have more interaction with each other, and students learn valuable skills in running & participating in a sprint.
Midterm and Final presentations on Talk. Each student posts a 5-minute video to talk at Midterm to demo their progress and again at the end to showcase what they’ve produced over the summer.
Presentation Summaries. Either GSoC admin(s) create a Talk post and/or the GSoC wiki page is updated at Midterm and for Final presentations so there’s one-page summary of the projects with a link ± teaser for each presentation. For example:
This would give a nicer overview than a list of Talk topics provides for people not directly involved with GSoC.
I like this and can support this. I would personally like to see students from this year’s GSoC still do a final presentation. I will at least get @plypy to do it…other mentors should follow suit.
We made the decision before GSoC to only require presentation videos at midterm evaluations for 3 reasons:
We wanted students to have more time in the final week to produce documentation and finalize tests, review code, etc.,
Most projects do not continue “full time” development past the end of GSoC and as such feedback is of limited use to the student, and
We do not currently expect our non-GSoC contributors to produce showcases on finished work, but rather generally just do design forums and work-in-progress presentations.
Of course, we encourage anyone (including GSoC students) to present their work often and in any medium they desire, to share with the rest of the community! GSoC mentors should always work with their students on a public communication plan about the project.
Should there be additional iterations of Google Summer of Code, we can revisit this approach again for improvements.
I’d love to do a presentation. However, as my pharyngitis reemerged recently and just had several interviews, which involve a siginificant amount of talk, I really want to give my throat a rest.
I appreciate the thought process, but it feels like GSoC just faded away and nothing happened. I’ve tried to find the output of a few of the projects and it’s not easy to find. Most of the project pages look like they did in April.
Maybe it doesn’t need to be videos, but it would certainly be an improvement to be able to see what happened in OpenMRS GSoC 2015. We used to make an anouncement summarizing the projects done over the summer and providing links to learn more about each. Perhaps just asking students to update their project page with progress and/or edit the page to turn it into the initial page of documentation would help.
@plypy, that’s fine – there’s no pressure from me – if you don’t want to, you do not need to. You did FANTASTIC work.
I recently merged some other work of his – some falls under GSoC, some was done outside of the program dates – but still merged as one PR; he did amazing work in bringing the ID Dashboard one step closer to a new release – with some nice changes to how things look!
@burke Yes you are right that community don’t know the exact thing what student are doing except there mentors. Development of the project is one thing with maintaining documents is other.
I don’t know which of the students disappointed you, but I think sometimes community feels we are doing nothing because except our mentors others (including student) don’t know what we are exactly doing. This can be improve.
As Burke Suggested, I and few student done that in summer by creating an OpenMRS Talk Topic about the project where student post themselves there progress with the screenshots of the work they are performing and technical specs. So other get the insight about the progress.
Our project description is very important. As a student of GSoC for two year I know while proposing a project We choose a project by which we are most comfortable and able to complete it with our given timeline. It is ok while proposing but after we all get selected we don’t know the project every one is doing. Every one is not familiar with each technology and we all are in learning phase but here I think the documentation at the wiki about the project is just an overview about the project that a normal person can understand. But we all don’t know how to do that. Here I think at the same talk topic or separate topic (like how to do this in OpenMRS module) we have to mention the exact tools, library and methods we are doing to build our project. This will be very helpful to future students or any contributors.
