QoC.2 – Iterations and thoughts

Quite a few weeks ago now, the Second official Quarter of Contribution wrapped up.  We had advertised 4 projects and found awesome contributors for all 4.  While all hackers gave a good effort, sometimes plans change and life gets in the way.  In the end we had 2 projects with very active contributors.

We had two projects with a lot of activity throughout the project:

• MozCI: introduction, wrap up
• WPT Results Viewer: introduction, wrap up

First off, this 2nd round of QoC wouldn’t have been possible without the Mentors creating projects and mentoring, nor without the great contributors volunteering their time to build great tools and features.

I really like to look at what worked and what didn’t, let me try to summarize some thoughts.

What worked well:

• building up interest in others to propose and mentor projects
• having the entire community in #ateam serve as an environment of encouragement and learning
• specifying exact start/end dates
• advertising on blogs/twitter/newsgroups to find great hackers

What I would like to see changed for QoC.3:

•  Be clear up front on what we expect.  Many contributors waited until the start date before working- that doesn’t give people a chance to ensure mentors and projects are a good fit for them (especially over a couple of months)
• Ensure each project has clear guidelines on code expectations.  Linting, Tests, self review before PR, etc.  These are all things which might be tough to define and tough to do at first, but it makes for better programmers and end products!
• Keep a check every other week on the projects as mentors (just a simple irc chat or email chain)
• Consider timing of the project, either on-demand as mentors want to do it, or continue in batches, but avoid with common mentor time off (work weeks, holidays)
• Encourage mentors to set weekly meetings and “office hours”

As it stands now, we are pushing on submitting Outreachy and GSoC project proposals, assuming that those programs pick up our projects, we will look at QoC.3 more into September or November.