After GHOP...

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cwgordon7's picture

Although it's very depressing and sadful, GHOP is drawing to a close. The question remains: what do we do now? We have many tasks that still need doing, yet we haven't had time to get to. We also have many, many, many awesome new contributors to Drupal, with nowhere to go. Let's avoid the two obvious paths of failure: for the tasks to be abandoned or the students to leave Drupal, never to come back again.

A proposed solution is to continue the GHOP program without Google's sponsorship. The details of this are somewhat hazy: Would it still be restricted to students? Would there still be prizes? Would the "winners" get some sort of recognition? Etc. So, post what you think would be the ideal solution, and then we can, if necessary, create an issue on drupal.org with the drupal.org webmasters to make whatever commitments are necessary (for example, promising a front-page post once a month with the "winners", etc.)

Looking forward to continuing this!

Comments

My thoughts...

webchick's picture

I totally agree that it would be a serious shame for this program to vanish completely until the next time it's run (assuming it's run again, but I think there's a great chance). Summer of Code of course does that whole vanishing thing every year. But Summer of Code is also a 2-3 month commitment on the part of all mentors, admins, and students, so it makes sense (we simply couldn't keep that up for 12-24 months, as much as we'd like to). However, GHOP is awesome, because the tasks are much smaller, shorter, and easier to manage.

So I'm definitely +1 for it continuing in some form after GHOP is "officially" over. And I'm actually excited about this prospect, since there are an awful lot of things we can't do at the moment since we have to abide by Google's contest rules, including:

  • Propose slightly longer, more involved tasks than a mere week can sustain
  • Let students suggest their own tasks to work on.
  • Let students mentor tasks themselves.
  • Let people work on multiple tasks at a time
  • Let people outside of the 13-18 year age range work on tasks.

For example, I know of /a lot/ of adults are looking for a way to get involved in the Drupal community, but they are at a distinct disadvantage to students because they're not eligible for GHOP, nor SoC, which are two excellent ways of lowering the barriers to start contributing (also, as I brought up before, a lot of us are just not as smart as you guys :D).

The other obvious advantage to this is that during this program, it was sometimes like pulling teeth to get halfway decent task ideas out of people. :\ But if we carried on this program after GHOP, we would hopefully end up with a surplus of hundreds of tasks. And if/when GHOP starts up again, we just yoink the top 100 or so that haven't been done yet.

Sponsorship in terms of $$$ might get a little tricky. My thought is that we'll probably have to prove the program can sustain itself without Google's help first, and then sponsorship dollars might come later. So in other words, we might need to think of alternate "rewards" than cash, at least at first. Your suggestion of an ongoing monthly front-page post sounds like a great idea, as not only will we want to promote the "winners" but we'll also want to attract more mentors constantly in order to keep the content fresh and new.

Also, we should have fun with a suitable name that doesn't involve Google, like:

  • Drupal TaskForce
  • DROP - Drupal *Really* Open Program ;P
  • Uh. I'm out of ideas. *lol*

The idea would be to start cataloging and classifying all of those high profile, fun, low barrier-to-entry tasks in the issue queue (as well as make some new ones!), along with who could look after it to help mentor people along.

I'd like to use d.o infrastructure for this as much as possible, but we might need a separate site with an issue tracking system similar to Google's to handle the tallying of task completion, documentation about the program, meta discussions, etc.

That's probably enough out of me for now. Suffice it to say, +1. :D

DROP - Drupal Rockin' Open Participation

kourge's picture

DROP - Drupal Rockin' Open Participation (or Program), a.k.a. Drupal Rumble of Pancakes. Awards include T-shirts and pancakes.

Hmm. This is a great idea,

birdmanx35's picture

Hmm. This is a great idea, and I'd definitely join up. A few things:

1) I listened to that Google podcast with Angie, Addison, and some other mentors from other projects (not to be a stalker, but I thought it would be interesting to see how other projects were doing), and I think the Joomla (maybe?) people were mentioning something about a program they have called Love (maybe?). But at any rate, they had some similar project working internally. I think we should check that out, see how they do it.
2) Perhaps we could get a ghop.drupal.org type domain name? We'd of course name it something else.
3) I'd do it without money, but I'd want some kind of accreditation certificate online (for college).
4) As far as names, I feel like Karma would be a great starting point. Which makes me think, perhaps we could have a digg-like Karma rating involved (+/- as necessary, you can only give so many points a day, etc).

I would definitely be

boombatower's picture

I would definitely be interested. I believe I mentioned that I was planning on continuing to work with Drupal after GHOP so this sounds great.

Lots of great ideas here. A

Bevan's picture

Lots of great ideas here. A few notes:

I've been really impressed with the work coming out of GHOP. I don't think we should aim to necessarily keep up the same momentum if we do our own thing. I'm wondering what the main motivators are for both mentors and students; the money, the resume, the community, karma, feel-good, something else. It's probably worth doing a survey or poll to find out and ensure such a program works.

There are many analogies between what is being proposed here and the intentions of the 'newbie' tag: http://drupal.org/taxonomy/term/108. Also Drupal Dojo has some similarities.

I think we should try get the drupal association on board to consider how they can help, especially in regards to some sort of reward (not necessarily monetary), and something that can stand out on a CV -- some sort of certification.

I agree that we should see how Joomla! does their thing and see if we can get Amy Stephen to help us out with ideas and structure.

Bevan/

I like the idea of having a

jaharmi's picture

I like the idea of having a standing list of small projects that people can propose, and which are there and ready for anyone, especially when something like GHOP comes up. Let’s not forget that it takes time for the community to write the task proposals, and the people who write them may not have that particular stretch of time to both imagine and write up a task, as well as review the results.

I especially like the idea of trying to keep the tasks down to an expected week of work. Everyone will work at different rates and the smaller we make the chunks, the more manageable they are for those who take them on and those who review them.

I don’t think it’s bad that a person can only work on one at a time. (Claiming more than one to work on is another story.) I’d like to see some opportunity for a small motivated group to collaborate on these small projects, because that would also be a way for a group to learn about Drupal.

Overall, GHOP sort-of reminds me (as a UserLand Manila refugee) of the “Love Manila Month” initiatives that were put on by UserLand every once in a while. They must have realized that people had all these often small wants/needs that weren’t being fulfilled by the software, so they proposed LMM to allow users to submit feedback. The developers — this was early commercial software for content management and blogging — worked on those proposals as they were posted for a whole month. Updates rolled out pretty quickly, and it was awesome.

Then again, after LMM, the momentum died down and the users didn’t see a lot of progress afterwards.

Dojo involvement

add1sun's picture

First of all this is a definitely something we should pursue. I'd really like for Dojo folks to get involved/speak up/step up on this since I think it lines up well with the overall mission of the Dojo group. To that end I am going to cross-post this thread there.

Also just so folks are aware the funding of a GHOP like project was raised by jredding in the marketing group in a thread re: budget (http://groups.drupal.org/node/6943.) That said, I definitely think we need to do this without cash and find more sustainable incentives. The idea of the contest is to provide incentive for folks to check out open source and see how it works, with the plan that learning the value of continuing to contribute will keep them going, even without the monetary incentive. Even Google themselves sees this as a kickstart program and not a long-term, continuous model to be followed. Not to say that we can't/shouldn't have some incentives, but I just think that community recognition and resume-building should be more of a focus than money and "things" which are much more likely to be temporarily available and dry up.

re: The other project's program is not Joomla!, but GNOME and their GnomeLove project.

Learn Drupal online at Drupalize.me

Aha! I felt I was wrong.

birdmanx35's picture

Aha! I felt I was wrong. Silly me.

+2.... DrupalKarma

Newbie

dragonwize's picture

I think our current "Newbie" issues are a great extension of the GHOP. It allows anyone to participate and is Drupal wide.

I see "newbie" as slightly different...

webchick's picture

Newbie says to me:

"You've never coded/reviewed/etc. a patch before, and this is an extremely simple change that is easy and well-contained for you to test the waters."

These types of tasks would take an experienced Drupal developer about 30 seconds to do, but they're great for introducing new people to the core development process. These might go through 2-3 revisions as we help instruct people on how to use the basic tools like CVS and patch, talk about coding standards, etc.

Where GHOP tasks are:

"We assume you know how to code your way around in PHP. So here's a week-long task that accomplishes a real need in the project, with a mentor assigned to it who can look over your progress and you can ping for help."

These tasks would take an experienced Drupal developer 2-3 days to do, and we allow 7 days for students, and they usually finish them in about 2 hours. ;) But basically, it's more of a commitment than a "Newbie" task, and will probably go through 4-5 revisions before it's marked RTBC. It also requires someone knowledgeable in the area of the task to pay attention, where Newbie tasks can be mentored by anyone who's ever submitted a patch before.

So I think both are important, but they're not quite the same.

Im torn between the idea, I

tjholowaychuk's picture

Im torn between the idea, I think getting 'newbies' involved is great, however it does 'waste' time. On the other hand the open source world is what I would recommend for anyone looking to learn, what can be better than code that has been written by hundreds of community members helping each other out!

vision media
350designs

Hm?

webchick's picture

How does helping newbies 'waste' time?

On the contrary, almost everyone who went after some 'patchnewbie' patches has subsequently become more involved in core development. :) Some are even helping other newbies now.

And the results from the GHOP students clearly speak for themselves. :)

Forsure, dont get me wrong I

tjholowaychuk's picture

Forsure, dont get me wrong I think its great that they are diving right into the project and helping out

vision media
350designs

nice!

catch's picture

Like webchick said, the difference with "patchnewbie" is that it's about how to work in the issue queue, patch format, code style, not necessarily about 'how to code' at all.

GHOP tasks are more about something the community needs (code, documentation, whatever). Not so complicated that only a handful of people could do it (be it a core patch or a contrib module), involved enough that whoever does so might need some guidance, and self-contained to the extent that there's a clear start and finish to the process, some measure of success, and therefore a useful learning process and some kind of tangible result at the end.

I know that for me, while I've found ways to contribute to core without much programming knowledge (and have been picking bits up as I go along) - there's quite a few things I'd like to change fairly substantially but don't want to either go off on my own to fix (probably unsuccessfully) or simply file feature requests for other people to fill, or not. Also although I've done tiny custom modules for sites etc. I've not yet found a contrib module I wanted that both doesn't already exist and which I have a chance in hell of coding.

I think this is where DROP ;) comes in - fully specced out for scope beforehand, then commitment work on it from both the mentee(s) and mentor(s) (either of whom, or neither, could be the proposer). That makes it a great way to get small to medium-sized tasks done for both core, contrib and docs - leading to more core contributors, contrib (co-)maintainers and active documentation team members in the process. Along with a bigger pool of mentors hopefully.

I didn't really grok what Dojo was for quite a while, and I never manage to keep track of when the live lessons are and have to make a real effort to watch screencasts (having a kid makes this pretty hard) so something a bit more project based would suit me pretty well.

As to infrastructure, a g.d.o group and a project for task proposals ought to be enough no? Especially if this gets linked with dojo.. I don't think a separate issue tracker is a good idea - I hated the google one and only looked at it if I really, really had to - much prefer stuff like this showing up in 'my issues', and navigable to project/issues/drop if I want to check it out.

So I think I may have just talked myself into helping out with this.

Synergize

gusaus's picture

Project-oriented learning is something that Drupal Dojo has discussed for a long time. Programs like GHOP and Summer of Code demonstrate that it works!

With the Dojo embarking on it's first project (the build of the new Dojo website), reevaluating it's goals, establishing a process for collaborative development, taking a look at incentives, and more... it seems like a great opportunity to lay everything on the table and see how the Dojo can 1) provide a means to 'carry the flame' for GHOP style tasks/projects; 2) provide the infrastructure for 'virtual classrooms/working groups; and 3) become more involved in the GHOP/SOC types of projects themselves.

GHOPers would bring a much needed jolt of energy/fresh thinking to the Dojo. That alone could get some of the over 1100 Dojo members actively involved. Identify ways to create synergy and we should bring a tremendous amount of value to the Drupal project and community.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin

DrupalCon

Bevan's picture

This should totally be a BoF or even presentation at DrupalCon.

Bevan/

Ok, then, here's a rough draft.

cwgordon7's picture

Ok, it sounds like people think this is generally a good idea. Here is a rough draft of how it's going to work. Nothing here is set in stone: I'll let everyone else argue over the specifics ;) .

  • Two projects on drupal.org: one for proposing short-term tasks, another for actually doing them. The advantages of this are:
    • We get to use drupal.org's project trackers.
    • The task proposal and task doing stay separate.
  • Proposed tasks get reviewed by the community, and once marked rtbc, moved over to the task-doing issue queue.
  • Tasks have several things they didn't have before:
    • A time limit:
      • It can be variable, as some tasks may take longer than others.
      • It's still good to have, because it keeps things moving.
    • An importance factor:
      • Some tasks are simply more important than others: making bluemarine recolorable, for instance, is of far more importance than porting module X to Drupal 6. (Maybe importance isn't the right word... impact? difficulty? educational?)
      • This way the students who claim more adventurous tasks aren't penalized.
  • Workflow:
    1. Task is proposed.
    2. Task proposal is reviewed, feedback given.
    3. Task is revised.
    4. Steps 2-3 are repeated until task is marked rtbc or won't fix.
    5. Accepted task is posted to the task-doing queue.
    6. Task is claimed by a student.
    7. Student has up until the time limit to do the task.
    8. If the task isn't finished by the time limit, attempt to contact student; allow three days in which to that. Extensions may be granted.
    9. Task is completed and marked for review.
    10. Task is reviewed, and feedback given.
    11. Steps 9-10 are repeated until task is marked rtbc or otherwise approved as specified by the task ("deliverables").
    12. Task is finished.
  • Notes on workflow:
    • Students may work on more than one task at a time.
    • If a task has been waiting more than three days for review, the task's owner gets negative karma points.
    • Students may claim tasks they've proposed.
  • The term "Students" does not just apply to 13-18 year olds: everyone is a student of life.
  • Drupal dojo: the dojo may become more and more involved in this as we go on. I think it's better to start them off as separate things and watch them naturally merge together rather than try to force cohesion where it might not belong.
  • Who's running this thing? Anyone who wants to. Anyone can review task ideas, as well as tasks themselves. In the case that no one contributes (which I'm sure you won't do), I'll step in to review task ideas, etc.

A counter-rough draft. :)

webchick's picture

[moved to http://groups.drupal.org/node/8383#comment-25616]

Can the Dojo and post-GHOP be complimentary?

gusaus's picture

Addi does a great job summing up things here. I'm curious to hear views from both groups. What things would the make the Dojo less 'slackish' in the eyes of GHOP/DHOP group? Would the Dojo 2.0. project be a good one to work on if we could effectively break the development chunks into tasks. Are there any Dojo ideas, features and tasks that might be useful to the GHOP/DHOP program? If the Dojos step up, mentor, promote, and participate in the task/project based group (without slowing them down), it could 'potentially' be mutually beneficial.

Gus Austin
PepperAlley Productions

Gus Austin