Re: Review small tasks suitable for student competition

[Bryen M Yunashko <a11yrocks bryen com>]

On Thu, 2010-12-30 at 16:31 +0000, Steve Lee wrote:
> Project:Possibility [1] organise the SS12 [2] coding competitions to
> get students working on and excited about open source accessibility
> projects. The students hack over a weekend and are judged. This year
> there are 3 competitions with the finals at the CSUN conference [3],
> which GNOME are attending for the second year. We're excited to say
> CSUN are also running in the competitions this year.
> 
> Last year we had 2 teams working on Caribou features [4]. This
> introduced the students to working with a real open source project. It
> also got some awesome student energy focussed on adding features into
> a GNOME a11y project. We'd like to do more of this for the next round,
> but we need good weekend hacking project ideas and mentors.
> 
> So the ask is that everyone review and update the small task wiki page
> [5] and add more ideas. For example the Caribou task to add skinning
> was recently patched by Eitan, The idea could perhaps now be updated
> to build cool features into Caribou based on this work? API already
> suggested Accerciser bug fixes and new plugins. So any cool ideas
> plugin ideas are most welcome, but bug fixes might not work so well in
> a competition unless careful chosen.
> 
> We also need mentors willing to be guide the students before, during
> and after the SS12 event. Last year Ben Konrath did a fantastic job
> and the students were issued certificates for contribution to GNOME by
> Stormy. So is anyone interested in mentoring next year?
> 
> Bryen is joining us in the Project:Possibility board meeting on 07/01
> to discuss this and it would be great to have more ideas or mentors by
> then.
> 
> 
> 1: http://www.projectpossibility.org
> 2: http://ss12.info/
> 3: http://http://csunconference.org/index.cfm
> 4: http://live.gnome.org/Caribou
> 5: http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved/SmallTasks
> 

We had a good conversation today in the Project Possibility board
meeting.  Those guys are certainly highly motivated to come up with
projects for their student teams.  And they're hoping that some ideas
can come from GNOME Accessibility as well.  

Their next student contest is scheduled for February, which is kind of
short notice for some of you.   Last year their weekend student contest
focused on Caribou and Ben Konrath was the mentor for the weekend.  I
believe we got some good results out of that, namely that it helped
boost Caribou visibility and thus to other groups giving attention to
Caribou.

I indicated that with the timing and pressures the GNOME A11y team is
facing now with the upcoming 3.0 release, we may or may not be able to
come up with resources.   So no promises made there to Project
Possibility, but if there is a possibility, I would love to see it
happen.

Over the next week, Steve and I will be assisting in working through
their list of ideas, which include a11y projects not limited to GNOME,
and seeing if there's any good fits for GNOME to come into the picture.
We'll be looking at
http://live.gnome.org/Accessibility/GetInvolved/SmallTasks for ideas.

Steve can give fuller details about when this contest will happen (I
believe weekend of February 5th) and what's involved.  If you think you
might be available as a mentor and have an idea for a good weekend hack
project, please do let us know.

Thanks,
Bryen
GNOME-A11y Outreach