Hi Season of Docs peeps!
I have updated the GSoD page as promised. If you read the referenced posts, there won't be anything new to you, but it may be organized a bit better.
Aspiring tech writers should apply to Google now, and specify GNU Mailman as your desired organization. You may apply more than once (I don't know if there's a limit, it's 5 in GSoC) to more than one organization. There's a little bit of information and a link to the GSoD site here: https://wiki.list.org/DEV/SeasonOfDocs2019#GSoD_Application_Process.
If GSoD uses a process similar to GSoC's, the proposal itself will be created as a Google doc.
I'm not sure how much structure the GSoD application form provides. Here's a basic outline of what we want to see. I'll try to refine it over the next couple of days, and post it to the GSoD page on our wiki.
At the top:
Contact information: your name (GSoD rules imply this may be a pseudonym; I have no problem with that and I'll check with Abhilash -- note that to get paid you have to give Google a real name, though!), email, phone number, IRC handle, any SNS handles you want to provide. This is most readable in "mail header format":
Name: .... E-mail: .... Phone: +(country code) (phone number) etc.
Three or four line summary of what task you propose to address.
Following, in some order, but not necessarily as written below:
Three or four lines of personal PR, something special about you that makes you a great choice for this program.
A resume of any work you've done as a writer or with an open source software project. It doesn't need to be formal. If it's publicly accessible, provide URLs. It doesn't need to be very long (and probably shouldn't be: at most four examples most representative of your best work).
A description of the work you propose to do. Write this well! Keep it at a consistent level of detail as much as possible.
A schedule for the work. Most important is to note any times you know you will be unavailable to work or off-line and hard to contact.
The schedule should specify milestones. Milestones are a crucial component of any schedule because they allow you to know whether you are keeping up with the schedule or not.
A *milestone* may be a deliverable such as a merge request for a document, or it may be some recognizable state along with an *objective* criterion for completion. For a 14-week project, 10-12 milestones is probably a good target. Less is acceptable, more is certainly overkill.
Don't be afraid of the milestones. Setting good milestones and estimating time to completion is a difficult art. You get better at it with practice. We don't expect everyone to write good milestones or to keep them with metronome precision, and we'll help you with writing yours. But avoiding them is a bad sign. It says your attitude is "I'll deliver when I deliver, you can just wait." And just thinking about them is useful. It requires rough estimates of the quantity of work and time required, and that will reflect on the proposal itself.
Looking forward to seeing everyone's proposals!
Steve
Abhilash Raj writes:
On Fri, May 31, 2019, at 12:24 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Hi,
I'm Steve, the org admin and principal mentor for Season of Docs (GSoD). The other mentor, Abhilash, is also Mailman project lead and org admin for Season of Code (GSoC). To pile on to those responsibilities, most of Mailman core (including all currently active devs) was at PyCon April 30 to May 9, work has sprung a few unpleasant surprises, and well, here we are.
I will try to update our SoD page on the wiki "soon" (probably Sunday), and will announce that when it happens here.