Outreach Program for Women/2013-01-03 Meeting

We had a first meeting via Google+ hangout on the first day of the Outreach Program for Women on 2013-01-03.

Participants

 * Interns: Valerie Juarez, Sucheta Ghoshal, Priyanka Nag, Mariya Miteva. Absents: Kim Schoonover (sent apology for technical problems), Teresa Cho.
 * Mentors: Sumana Harihareswara, Brandon Harris, Andre Klapper, Amir E. Aharoni, Mark Holmquist, Sébastien Santoro.
 * Coordinator: Quim Gil.

Welcome
We started with a long delay due to technical problems from some interns joining the hangout.

Quim: We have received all the internship agreements except Priyanka's. Amir / Priyanka to get it signed and sent. Quim: About reporting, what matters is to keep your wiki pages up to date and communicate about relevant steps at wikitech-l or the appropriate mailing list. This is the good open source development practice. No e.g. weekly reports in doc files needed. Sumana: You may also want to have your blogs.

Introductions
All participants in the meeting introduced themselves and their goals with this project. (Check their User pages as the main information should be there).

Goals of the program
Quim: Of course the goal is to complete your projects on time. But actually our main motivation is that interns find in these 3 months that this community is a great place to learn, meet interesting people and build your career. We hope that after the internship period you stay around as community members. This is why we ask you to use the regular community channels and ways of working since the first day.

Sumana: After the experience of previous programs, a common obstacle seems to be to wait too long for ask a question, or share a problem. The solution is simple: do not wait. Ask your mentor, or simply ask on IRC, in a mailing list, in a bug report...

Quim: For newcomers it might feel like everybody else in this community has been here for long, but that is not the case. Be bold. Your mentors are here to help, and the community is here to help.

Questions?
Valerie: I'm supposed to triage bug reports but sometimes it can take a long time to know about a feature in order to test it and try to replicate the bugs. For instance, I started looking at old bugs at Extension:Drafts.

Andre: Yes, it's easy to end up spending a lot of time getting deeper in the bugs, but you need to remember that you are triaging bugs, and not necessarily get into a specific one for too long. You are not testing.

Quim: In general, before spending a lot of time on something it is good to ask. For instance, the Drafts extension is currently unmaintained and all those bugs are reported/assigned to one developer that happens to work at the Wikimedia Foundation. It might be easier to just go and ask him what are you supposed to do with these old bugs, perhaps the answer is simply WONTFIX all.

And after a few misc comments more the meeting was finished. We will do another one in a month.