Selenium as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization -- Need your Project Ideas!

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Jason Huggins

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Mar 10, 2010, 12:16:10 AM3/10/10
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Hello Selenium Developers!

We should have Selenium serve as a mentoring organization for Google's
Summer of Code program this year.

The deadline is this Friday, March 12 at 23:00 UTC. Your timely
feedback (within the next 24 hours) is greatly appreciated.

Most pressing item is finalizing the list of project ideas. The
official ideas page lives here:
http://wiki.openqa.org/display/SEL/2010+Google+Summer+of+Code

We're looking for project ideas that would take about two months to
accomplish for a college student new to Selenium. If you have an idea
that you'd like to see on the list, please login and add your idea!
With that said, the Selenium core committers may remove / edit /
combine project ideas to make them more cohesive.

Other blocking and tackling items:

* Official administrator for the application.
Grace Law, a colleague of mine at Sauce Labs, has volunteered to act
as organizer. The administrator's role is specified in the program
FAQ: http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2010/faqs#org_admin_role
Does anyone want to serve as back-up to Grace?


* Mentors. We need mentors!
Please consider becoming a mentor! If you are interested in becoming a
mentor, in addition to submitting your project ideas on the wiki page,
contact Grace Law ( gr...@saucelabs.com ) with a quick bio, contact
info, project you'd like to lead.


- Jason Huggins
creator, selenium
cofounder, sauce labs
http://saucelabs.com
"Cross-browser testing with Selenium made easy —
in the cloud or on-premise."

Patrick Lightbody

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Mar 10, 2010, 2:41:43 PM3/10/10
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I'll be writing up my wishlist while on the plane tonight and will get
it out tomorrow. But you can count me in as a mentor for sure.

Patrick

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Kevin Menard

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Mar 10, 2010, 7:39:36 PM3/10/10
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Not being a Selenium team member, I can't volunteer as a mentor. But,
I've mentored four students for GSoC for the Apache Cayenne project,
so I'd be happy to share my experiences with anyone that's
contemplating being a mentor.

--
Kevin

Adam Goucher

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Mar 10, 2010, 9:11:55 PM3/10/10
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On 10-03-10 7:39 PM, Kevin Menard wrote:
> Not being a Selenium team member, I can't volunteer as a mentor. But,
> I've mentored four students for GSoC for the Apache Cayenne project,
> so I'd be happy to share my experiences with anyone that's
> contemplating being a mentor.
>
>
I'll not speak for Jason (this time) but I'm not sure that not having
commit access into the the Se repo is necessarily a stopper. If there is
an idea you are passionate around with Se and have the time / drive to
mentor a SoC student in then by all means put it on the wiki with your
name beside it. And/or, post it on here for people to comment on.

-adam
http://element34.ca

hugs

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Mar 11, 2010, 1:59:35 PM3/11/10
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On Mar 10, 8:11 pm, Adam Goucher <a...@goucher.ca> wrote:
> I'll not speak for Jason (this time) but I'm not sure that not having
> commit access into the the Se repo is necessarily a stopper. If there is
> an idea you are passionate around with Se and have the time / drive to
> mentor a SoC student in then by all means put it on the wiki with your
> name beside it. And/or, post it on here for people to comment on.

Correct... and I'll speak on behalf of the committers (which is
dangerous even for me to do)... and say you can be a mentor without
being a committer on the Selenium project. However, the committers
reserve the right to not merge back any code created during SoC. So
best to have whatever project you work on have some blessing from the
team.

-jason

Patrick Lightbody

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Mar 11, 2010, 2:11:17 PM3/11/10
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I'm going to disagree/tweak a tiny bit... I just said this same thing
on IRC a few minutes ago:

With no disrespect meant towards Kevin or Eric Allen or some of the
other names I see on the page, I'm not sure sure we should be
encouraging non-core committers to take lead on these projects. We
have a bit of a crisis of leadership right now that is resulting in a
murky roadmap for our users. Taking on these other projects without
sponsorship from the core team could result in more confusion.

What I'd like to propose is that each initiative have an "executive
sponsor" from the dev team - basically a lead mentor. Each project
doesn't have to necessarily fit in to some grand roadmap (particularly
since we don't really have one), but it should at least be championed
by Simon, Adam, Jason, etc and they should be able to explain and
justify why it's a worthwhile endeavor.

Without that we're at risk of continuing what we're already doing:
pulling the project in multiple (and sometimes competing) directions.
Once we've got a lead mentor, I have no problem encouraging others to
participate and be mentors, or even do the majority of the legwork.

So really, I'm not disagreeing too much with what Jason just said,
except that I think we should add a "Lead Mentor" label to each
project and make sure it's someone on the dev team who will take some
ownership.

Patrick

--
We provide FREE website monitoring and load testing
http://browsermob.com

Patrick Lightbody
Founder, BrowserMob
+1 (503) 828-9003 x 101

Jason Huggins

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Mar 11, 2010, 2:59:59 PM3/11/10
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On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 1:11 PM, Patrick Lightbody
<pat...@lightbody.net> wrote:
> So really, I'm not disagreeing too much with what Jason just said,
> except that I think we should add a "Lead Mentor" label to each
> project and make sure it's someone on the dev team who will take some
> ownership.

+1 to having a Lead Mentor.

However, here's what the SoC says about the ideas page:

http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/2008/faqs.html#0.1_ideas
"""
Keep in mind that your Ideas list should be a starting point for
student applications; we've heard from past mentoring organization
participants that some of their best student projects are those that
greatly expanded on a proposed idea or were blue-sky proposals not
mentioned on the Ideas list at all.
"""

And here's the official project timeline:
http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/2008/faqs.html#0.1_timeline

Key lines:
March 17: List of accepted mentoring organizations published on the
Google Summer of Code home page.
March 17-24: "Would-be student participants discuss application ideas
with mentoring organizations."

So... I think until tomorrow, we should be collecting ideas from
anyone on the ideas page.. However, *by* March 17... every one of the
ideas should have a Lead Mentor listed so the SoC discussion period
won't lead to the confusion that Patrick rightfully predicts would
happen.

-jason

Patrick Lightbody

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Mar 11, 2010, 3:02:41 PM3/11/10
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Perfect- thanks Jason!

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