[Sugar-devel] GCI'18 Report

[Chihurumnaya Ibiam]

Hi Everyone,

This is a report about last year's GCI.

674 students participated. Of those, 245 completed at least one task.
The most popular task completed by students was our beginner task: "Make a
Pull Request", which was completed by 100 students. 60 students completed
the "Install the Sugar Environment" task.

• Briefly what was merged; that is, the work that has become part of
  the Sugar Labs software.

We have about 91 PRs that were merged,

Sugar/Activities = 20
Sugarizer = 20
MusicBlocks = 38
TurtleBlocks = 2
Sugar Social = 6
Sugar Website = 5

• Briefly what remains to be merged; work of value that we should
  focus on completing ourselves.

These are the open PRs from gci students
https://codein.withgoogle.com/dashboard/task-instances/5046504289992704/
https://github.com/sugarlabs/musicblocks/pull/1626
https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/pull/401
https://github.com/sugarlabs/cookie-search-activity/pull/17
https://github.com/sugarlabs/Bounce/pull/13
https://github.com/sugarlabs/gmail-activity/pull/28
https://github.com/sugarlabs/block-party-activity/pull/7
https://github.com/godiard/help-activity/pull/103

There are 12 PRs that were not merged in Music Blocks, a handful of which
are still under review.

• Briefly what won't be merged; work that we don't see value in merging.

A lot of the design tasks won't be merged but they'll be used for
marketing.

One of the tasks we had was to gather contributors data from the wiki and
translations, they won't be merged but we're making use of the data for our
contributors page, and the contributors page still has an open PR
<https://github.com/sugarlabs/www-sugarlabs/pull/251> being worked on by
one of the students, although that wasn't a GCI project but it's something
we need to complete.

• What funding Google provided,
We received $2500 midway through the competition.
We also received $2200 earlier this month for the mentor's trip to Silicon
valley.

• What travel we should expect to fund, e.g. a mentor to a summit,
We should expect to fund about $2200 for a mentor.

• How our new mentors performed
Our new mentors did well as they responded to the students in a timely
manner.

And sometimes it seemed there were conflicts between the mentors, where one
would request something from a student and another would request something
else thereby confusing the student about what to do.
This is legitimate and why Walter asked that only a select group of mentors
sign off on tasks to begin with, that request was occasionally ignored.
Might be something that Google need to add for next time.

When the competition started, some non coding tasks were accepted although
they weren't of high quality, but this stopped as we moved further into the
competition.
Walter and I in our emails added that tasks of low quality shouldn't be
accepted as a reminder to the mentors.

• Your overall impression of this event

The event was fun and I enjoyed every bit of it.

• How we might improve next year.

It may seem like conventional wisdom that some of our mentors lacked
knowledge about some tasks or weren't contributors to Sugar Labs but every
mentor had previously contributed to Sugar Labs in one way or another.

It'll be great if the tasks we want are agreed upon as an org, as this
gives a definite direction and narrows down the type of tasks we have.

Although it seems as if we got little if any help from the  community in
generating task ideas. It was all on the shoulders of just a few of us.
That needs to improve. And I think we had too many open-ended design tasks
-- we should pare back that somewhat next year, but not eliminate them.
(They are required by Google, for one thing.) Maybe structure them such
that a student can only do 1 or 2 simple design tasks by marking them as
beginner tasks (although I think that was the case for the most part this
year too.)

--

Ibiam Chihurumnaya
ibiamchihurumnaya at sugarlabs.org <ibiamchihurumnaya at gmail.com>
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