Fedora-Student Mentor Programme/Draft

This is for approaching an institute to formally collaborate with them and having students as interns at fp.o

Intention of the program

Note
This intention would be a response to 'why should we allow our students to do stuff in Fedora' question from educators

To provide a guided means to Final and pre-Final year students to learn about how to produce Open Source Software and contribute to other areas of a Open Source Project, e.g translation, artwork, infrastructure management by working with an existing project like The Fedora Project.

This program will also enable students to acquire other necessary "soft skills" like responsibility, collaborative work, communicating and leadership, as they will work at an environment which is global not only in terms of countries, but also in terms of people, culture and work.

What is the delivery model

Mentoring through IRC when it comes to pre-loading them with data that is common to all. Further on for specific projects it moves on to a mentor-mentee off-list communication with scheduled tracking on the mailing list and regular monthly meetings.

Who would be the mentors

Interested (and competent) *@fedoraproject.org people, who are long term and established contributors, preferably from India.

(That is mentors are generally local. For this program at Bangladesh(for example), mentors are preferably from Bangladesh.)

What all would be pre-requisite to participate

Model 1, when we collaborate with an Institute

At the initial stage, there would be two workshops, first one will be general overview, the second one is a follow up after one week.

The first one will have no requisite. The second one will be only for the first workshop participants and generally its subset. This workshop

Model 2, When we accept people on web

There will be no offline workshop, but we will guide him through IRC channel and other online means.

How would interns be selected

• When collaborating with an institute, at the end of second workshop, we will take them on board, help them to create account, make familiar with irc, mailing lists etc. At this phase, they will know existing contributors, collaborate and be familiar with the etiquettes.

• During this period, we will give each student a series of problems to solve. The problems will be chosen such a way that should test their intention and eagerness to participate.

• Additionally, books like "Producing Open Source Software" would be rolled into the orientation process to ensure terms like IRC, SVN etc are not something from outer space.

• On successfully handling this, they can be taken on board.

How would they be 'Fedora' assimilated

• They will now be given problems to choose from.

• This problems areas will be pre-identified by the mentors.

• Their progress will be periodically verified at the mailing lists and may be at some irc meeting.

Total Workflow

• Workshops/Online interaction.
• Identifying interested students.
• Help on Installation/Configuration of Fedora and other required softwares.
• Getting the perfect system in place.
• A series of small problems and evaluation.
• Successful handling of problem.
• Help creating Fedora account.
• Help getting familiar with Fedora people, interaction process, communication channels, books.
• Identifying problems, assigning mentor and working on it.
• Progress tracking.
• Issuing Certificate.

Can the project issue a certificate

At successful completion of the project, they will be issued certificate from Fedora.

Note
Discuss with FamsCo.

This is a must. Otherwise a very few people will feel motivated to contribute at the early phase.