Task outline

The primary requirement for a new task is that it be specific.

It helps if it's relatively small, but there's nothing wrong with challenging students with bigger tasks ;). The idea is to have tasks take students at most 2-4 days with 2-3 hrs of work a day, but obviously that will vary with student skills.

Don't feel like you need to write down every detail needed to accomplish the task, but do not be vague. Students with good google fu (hah!) should be given enough info to figure stuff out, but we should be encouraging student communication.

Provide specific completion criteria for the task, so the completeness of a submission can be judged accurately. Code and documentation contributions can be sent to individual project sites, but should also be added to the task as comments or file attachments.

Note that tasks cannot build on other tasks that aren't complete yet. We have to wait to create dependent tasks until the dependencies are resolved.

If you don't already have a project in mind but want to contribute by writing up a new project, go check out ProjectIdeaIndex and ProjectSuggestionNotes!

Submitting a task

Please don't enter tasks directly into the tracker. We are batching new task creations for admin and review purposes, and we can't edit a task once it's been submitted; if there are errors in the task, we have to either delete/withdraw it (which is bad) or amend it with comments (which is confusing).

Here's our process for submitting new tasks:

First, send your idea(s) to the ghop-python list. If you get critical responses, please try to answer them or revise your task appropriately! No comments means that no one has anything negative to say ;) Second, write up your task(s) in the proper format. There are examples in the subversion archive under new-tasks/.

Third, ask for subversion write privileges and check your tasks into the trunk/submissions/ directory, or send them to the mailing list with a note that you think they're ready!

Please give us your gmail/code.google.com account name so that we can add you as a project member & put you on the automatic CC list for the task. Note that if you are just submitting a task but won't be able to mentor or judge it, you should write your task so that someone relatively unfamiliar with the project can judge it.

Oh, and Wiki markup (and live links) don't show up in task descriptions. (This is a known "feature".)