Google Code-in is a contest sponsored by Google for helping engage 13-17 year old high school students in open source projects. Drupal is applying as a mentoring organization, and in order to do that, we need a list of tasks in five categories (Code, Documentation/Training, Outreach/Research, Quality Assurance, and User Interface) lined up for participants to start working on.
We are currently working on our mentorship application. In order to submit it, we need a variety of high-quality tasks for students to work on. We need at least 5 tasks in each category for application (deadline: 5th Nov 2012), but we will need much more if we get accepted (at least 150). That's where you come in! :D
Tasks should take about two hours work if done by an experienced developer. It will most likely take more time to most of students, but it is a good rule of thumb. Some example tasks are given below. If you have ideas on high-impact and interesting things for a budding open source contributor to work on, please help! /join #drupal-gci and http://groups.drupal.org/google-code-in and read the following guidelines.
How to submit a task
- Propose proper, full tasks, not task ideas. We need tasks written up according to the task guidelines. These tasks can be for core, contributed modules, documentation, usability, drupal.org infrastructure, whatever you can imagine.
- Post an issue to the Drupal.org Google Code-In 2012 sandbox's issue queue with your task write-up to propose your task idea (check first if it exists already here). The admins and the rest of the community can then review the task and suggest revisions.
- Select the component that maps to the category of your task (e.g. User Interface, Code)
- Follow the template at http://groups.drupal.org/node/263168... (deliverables, primary contact, etc.)
- Tag your issue as gci-proposal
Also tag the issue using one tag from each of these:
Category: gci-code, gci-docs, gci-outreach, gci-qa, gci-ui - Get reviews. Ping someone in #drupal-contribute to take a look at your task idea. They will either mark it "needs work" or "reviewed & tested by the community". Once marked "reviewed & tested by the community", an administrator will move it to Code-in task management tool.
- Remove 'gci-proposal' tag, replace with 'gci-task' tag
Good task ideas
- Create A Short Administrator Screencast Introducing Views module -- very detailed spec, so there's no question of what's expected.
- Research Microformats and recommend ways they could be used in Drupal -- Microformats are interesting outside of Drupal, so knowledge gained here is transferable.
- Take screen shots of all themes that are missing -- Low barrier to entry, but an extremely important task.
- Improve initial user experience -- both important and can be re-issued as task to multiple participants.
Bad task ideas
- Rewrite the node system. This task is not doable in the timeframe, even by a Drupal ninja.
- Port the webchick theme to Drupal 7. This is a personal itch to scratch that doesn't have a lot of impact in the project overall.
- Find five documents in the handbook that are out of date. This is a "wildcard" task; it would be much better to find specific documents that need work and make fixing those into a task.
- Port the Pathauto module to Drupal 7. This task has already been done by the community.
Propose tasks here! Thanks!