The Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest has been running for a couple of weeks now, and the Mono Project has seen a fair bit of action. Sadly we’ve only had five completed tasks, with a couple more almost done. On a lot of the claimed tasks, many of the students and mentors have been slow to act, busy with real life work. I think that the timescale of the tasks makes things difficult. It’s not easy to think up a task that an inexperienced student can complete within five days, especially considering that they often need to get up to speed with the technologies before starting, and need to fit it in around schoolwork. Hopefully now that the Christmas holidays are beginning, students will have a lot more time to spend on the GHOP!
I apologise to any student who’s been held up from starting further tasks because of delays in reviewing and closing the tasks. Doing a proper job takes quite a bit of time, and the Mono team has a lot of other important things to do too, like getting the shiny new Mono 1.2.6 and MonoDevelop 1.0 Beta 3 releases ready.
I’d like to put out a general request to everyone and anyone in the Mono community, or working with Mono-based apps, to lend a hand for the GHOP. You can submit proposals for tasks on the Mono GHOP issue tracker, and critique students’ work. It doesn’t matter if you can’t write code — help with docs or icons. Go out and send students our way. This has the potential to be a huge community event. You can find us hanging out on #mono-ghop as well as the usual IRC channels on GIMPNet IRC.