Facebook Open Academy

Facebook Open Academy program promotes the collaboration between universities and open source organizations. Teams of Computer Science students work together in projects mentored by OSS community contributors.

Wikimedia participated in the 2014 edition.

Evaluation
This was our first participation in this program, and we obtained mixed results. This program is very different than GSoC or FLOSS OPW, the dedication of mentors might be even more demanding, and the results in terms of code produced might be dubious. On the other hand, from the point of view of introducing remarkable Computer Science students into open source and collaborative development, the program is very valuable. The results change significantly from project to project, so it is difficult to establish conclusions.

Check the evaluations of the mentors and the org admin at Evaluate Wikimedia's participation in Facebook Open Academy.

Timeline
The rough timeline is:


 * December-January: project planning and creation of teams.
 * February 7th - 9th (Friday-Sunday) "Code Sprint" at Facebook HQ in Menlo Park.
 * February - May/June: development.

This program involves different universities from different countries following different school calendars. This is why the dates are more flexible altogether.

Projects

 * Projects must link to their main project page
 * Mentors and Students must link to their user pages and identify their location
 * Status must mark the main project milestones as ✅:
 * team formed: mentors and students identified, project page created, communication channels agreed
 * project started: goals defined, tasks distributed, everybody in charge of something
 * monthly reports: starting in January, to be integrated in Wikimedia's monthly report
 * project ended, completed or not, including a final evaluation
 * #Bug must link to the tracking Bugzilla report.