GHOP

Hi Everyone

Students: Please read this message, even if you have already submitted your prize claim form. You may still need to do one more thing to get your prizes.

1. If you have not already claimed your prize, you are in luck. Google has extended the deadline by one week. You now must submit your prize claim form by Friday, 29 February at 8:00 UTC. You can find all instructions for submitting your prize claim
   form here:
   http://tinyurl.com/3bwl4k

I'd just like to give a warm welcome to everyone involved with DROP- students, mentors, and admins alike! For those of you that don't know, DROP is a successor to the just-closed GHOP program- we want all that learning and contributing to continue all year. So, head on over to the DROP site, sign up for a task, or create one yourself. Let us know how we can help you!

Hey everyone

If you haven't done so already, please go to http://groups.google.com/group/ghop-announce/browse_thread/thread/5c541b... for information on how to claim your prizes. You'll need to fill out a form with your mailing address and the list of tasks you completed and send that to Google. You should have already sent in your parental consent form. If not, information on how to do that is at http://groups.google.com/group/ghop-announce/browse_thread/thread/e5dd79....

Let us know if you have any questions.

Some of you may have seen Kieran Lal's pitch to the Drupal community to help get Derek Wright (dww) and Chad Phillips (hunmonk) to DrupalCon Boston to work on the crucial Project* modules, and many of you chipped in to help Derek and Chad reach their goals. But the project* team can still use your help!

Adam Light (aclight on Drupal.org) is also trying to get to DrupalCon to work on Project*, and trust me, it will be worth ten times whatever you can give. I have only had limited interactions with Adam, who I don't know personally, but even those limited interactions have blown my socks off. Adam was a tireless volunteer for the GHOP program, and his work with these students was truly out of this world (take a look at any of the GHOP issues that Adam helped out with and you'll see what I'm referring to). As Webchick noted on her blog post asking for help for Adam and Jimmy "boombatower" Berry: "Adam was the one primarily carrying the torch during the latter half of the GHOP program, and was critical to ensuring its success."

I happened upon a blog post Adam wrote in which he requested assistance on the DrupalCon Boston feed, and I think that Adam is a bit too modest to post his request here, so that's why I'm writing this. Here's how Adam describes his contributions to Drupal:

Recently, a GHOP student asked me for some help in dealing with usability issues in drupal contrib and wanted to know about resources for learning usability. Here I've published my response for others' benefit too:

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Hi,

I consider myself a usability student. I'm definitely not a usability expert -- although I have a strong interest in it and I pursue that interest aside from my paid work, mostly through drupal. Anyway, here are my thoughts;

Like many things in life, I think usability is one of those things many people just 'get' naturally. I call this 'usability sense'. It's also possible to 'learn' usability and improve usability sense, knowledge and understanding through practice, literature and other resources.

In this way 'learning usability' is a lot like learning to play music. Many people 'get' music straight away. They learn the tools (their musical instruments) and then they're away.

Below is a draft of the front-page final status report on GHOP. Feedback is appreciated. :)
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Note: This post assumes that you are aware of the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. If not, see that link, or listen to the latest Lullabot podcast about GHOP.

Since our last status report on January 2, 2008:

• An additional 12 students have taken on tasks from the Drupal project, bringing our total to 54 student participants.
• 11 new students have completed one or more tasks, bringing our total to 49, which means that Drupal has just gained that many AWESOME contributors! Of that number, approximately 65% are brand new contributors who came to the Drupal project because of this contest.
• There have been a total of 136 tasks completed so far, which is more than double the last report, which marked us at 67 completed tasks. This means that 69 new tasks to benefit the community have been done in just the last month. The leaders in terms of raw task numbers are boombatower (12) and Corsix (15), with cwgordon7 (9), kourge (9) and ezyang (10) coming up behind. As their high drupal.org user ids indicate, all of these top students except kourge and cwgordon7 were brought to Drupal from the GHOP program— and they are planning on remaining long-term contributors to the Drupal community.
• Thanks to everyone for all of the community support we've received on this project! Your help made it possible for these students to experience the power of an awesome open source community, and gave the community a big boost in the number of contributors.

This is it, GHOP is over! However, judging from it's success, we feel confident that this program will be repeated again next year. There will also be a session on GHOP at Drupalcon if you're interested in learning more about the program and what has been achieved in the past two months.

Read on for a description of the tasks that have been completed since the last status update.

For the past two months, I have been acting as one of the administrators of the Drupal side of the Google Highly Open Participation program (GHOP for short). Briefly, this is a contest that is sponsored by Google in which secondary students (ages 13-18) can claim and complete short one week tasks created by the Drupal community for cash prizes. One of the requirements of the program is that everyone has to use the Google Code task/issue tracker for tracking the "official" progress of the students throughout their tasks. As I have been pretty involved with development of our own issue tracker (the Project issue tracking module used on drupal.org), I thought it would be useful to provide a comparison of the features of these two different systems and make some suggestions of how we can improve the Project issue tracking module to make it even better than it already is.

I'll start by giving an introduction to the main issue tracking features of both the Project issue tracking module and the Google code tracker. I'll also give a description of the administrative user interface from an individual project owner/maintainer's perspective. Next, I'll provide a feature comparison and point out the pros and cons of both systems. Finally, I'll provide some recommendations on specific areas where we can add or improve the Project issue tracking module to make it better than it already is. I want to point out that I am not mentioning any of the features of either tracker that allow it to interface with code, releases, or repositories since we did not use any such features for the GHOP program and thus I would not be able to make a fair comparison.

I have created a series of four usability testing tasks in the GHOP programme. Each one tests a different area of Drupal:

• Installation (Claimed)
• Admin (Claimed)
• Node add and edit (Open)
• Anonymous Browsing (Open)

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.

In case you don't know, Edward Z. Yang (ezyang) is squashing a lot of bugs in coder_format in the scope of a GHOP task currently.
In case you don't know coder_format, it's a script I wrote some time ago which re-formats one PHP file, or recursively all files in a directory according to Drupal's Coding Standards. Doug Green has been so kind to add it to the Coder module, so if you are a Drupal developer, you probably have (an out-dated version of) it already. Unfortunately, it did not receive that much attention yet.

I do not yet want to promote coder_format with this post. Today, I just want to show you the results of an experiment, which in turn will show you, what you can expect from coder_format.

Guess, what this ugly code snippet is: