Good idea! Your reference to "below 18" means that this session is mainly focus to them (but open to everyone) or exclusively for them?

@Qgil Yup! I think it could be focused on them (below 18), but be kept open for everyone.

Is there a date for this session?

@Qgil I'm doing too bad on this task :(

@Aklapper same... doing too too bad on this task :( I am wondering if, by Thursday, I come up with a few communication guidelines or perhaps may be a general one too for mentoring tasks, we send out the invitations to mentors on Friday and run a hangout next week sometime on Monday or Tuesday? How would that be? If I come up with a good plan for both the scenarios well by Thursday then good, if not then would you, or one of the other admins might be able to take some bits and pieces of the session? Any thoughts?

In T150636#2817444, @srishakatux wrote:

I am wondering if, by Thursday

@srishakatux, your employer's calendar says that Thursday and Friday are holidays in the place where you live. :) So no, this doesn't look like a good idea to me. :) It's ok, really ok. Google Code-in first days are always a bit messy, and that is fine. Whatever it is, you can work on it next week. Please do take a well deserved rest.

@srishakatux: No worries. I haven't followed up on this either so I want part of the blame! ;-)

Within the next days (=Fri-Sun) we (=I) should draft and send an email to our registered mentors anyway with some basic info (or just a heads-up that GCI starts this Monday). So if we wanted to schedule an optional Hangout session at some point next week (really does not have to take place before the contest starts on Monday) we could add the time/date/intention/topics to that email, and at some point trigger the actual invitiations from within Google Calendar.

Gathering information from resources available on GCI’s website, a few discussion topics on the GCI’s mailing list, documentation on our MediaWiki for mentors, and adding a little bit here and there, I have prepared a presentation for our new mentors.

Here is the link to it:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1eeh3qtrfhsxcvZNEbSJlkdwdWKEj0AWZ64GxY9-6Kq4/edit. I'm inviting you all to edit/ give feedback on it in a bit.

The information contained in the slides is a shorter version of what we already have on the wiki. But, more importantly, my hope is that this session will help us understand where our new mentors are in this process, if they are acutely aware of how this works, can discuss any related questions that they might have, and know who/ how to reach out for help!

To understand if this session was helpful for our participants, I am planning to run a survey after the hangout with a few specific asks such as:

• How useful was this information session?
• How comfortable were you mentoring a student before this session?
• How comfortable you feel mentoring a student now after this session?

We could run a session on Thursday, December 1st, at 11 am PST.

Two questions:

• I read in one of the GCI's guidelines that if we find someone is cheating, then we should be reporting the incident to Google, and then a student's participation would be banned from the contest. In my opinion, we could warn a student for a plagiarized work for the first time, and then maybe teach them how to give credits to the author and ask them questions about their approach. Any thoughts on this, as I am planning to highlight this a bit in the session?
• My understanding is that organization admins would be importing all the tasks from Phabricator during the contest. But there might be times when a mentor might want to create a task on GCI site, and that's why we have all instructions on the Mentors page, and I included the same in the slides as well. Is that correct?

If all of the above sounds okay, then @Aklapper in your email to mentors you could include something like: "Send an email to Srishti (my email address) if you are interested in attending our info session which will take place on Thursday, December 1st, at 11 am PST". I could then use that information for following up with our mentors.

We could run a session on Wednesday, December 1st, at 11 am PST.

@srishakatux: Hmm, 19:00 UTC = 00:30 in the morning in India. Looking at the many UTC+0530 mentors that feels a bit late to me?

The rest looks great though and I might be bold and edit your slides (thanks!) a little bit. :)

@Aklapper How about 9am PST on Thursday, December 1st then? Please please, feel free to edit the slides :)

Alright! :) (And I might send that general email to mentors tomorrow (in European terms) as it's been a long day, let's see)

In T150636#2828007, @srishakatux wrote:

@Aklapper How about 9am PST on Thursday, December 1st then? Please please, feel free to edit the slides :)

Don't forget to change the task description. :)

Also, a one-day before is not that cool. :/

Mentioned this idea of having a Hangout + its time + date in the general email that I just sent to all Wikimedia GCI mentors, and that separate invitations will be sent out about this Hangout. @srishakatux: Feel free to set up and invite folks via Google Calendar! And thanks! :)

Invite sent for info session via Google Calendar to all our mentors!

@Aklapper Link to the survey form that you've access to now, feel free to edit: https://docs.google.com/a/wikimedia.org/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfoONwKDgqIW_GNGM6IA8ECO_gU6M42VkDlEyUSMHzMGrDO7Q/viewform.

This was very nice and useful! I think about 10-12 people attended.
Do you want to export and publish the slides maybe? (though not sure about content license etc)

Sharing a bit more information about the event statistics and survey results:

Participation:

• We reached out to our 45 GCI mentors for the information session by sending them a Google Calendar invite.
• Out of the 45, 19 responded to the calendar invitation: 6 said "Yes", 6 said "Maybe", and 5 said "No".
• 13 people joined the session.
• Out of the 13 participants, we had about 6 people outside of WMF who participated (including our wonderful @01tonythomas). Out of these 6, there were around 2-3 dropping in and out due to bad internet connectivity. I feel bad for them :(
• For majority, it was their first time mentoring for Google Code-in.

Survey results are here:

• 7 people filled out our survey
• 100% said that the session was useful for them
• % of people who said they were comfortable mentoring before and after the information session changed (see two screenshots attached below)

It was good to learn from one of the WMF mentors that they didn't know that the focus for GCI is not to get more tasks done for the organization, rather help students learn and have a good experience! And, also the discussions that people had in the hangout chat.

Slides from the information session are now on commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Information_session_for_Wikimedia%E2%80%99s_Google_Code-In_2016_new_mentors.pdf. I am sending a follow-up to our attendees in a bit, and will share with them these slides.

Thank you so much @Aklapper for answering participant's queries and all the support! It was a fun little experiment! :) I'm closing this task now.

Excellent work guys! Yay!

Wow, thank you for organizing the session and thank you for the summary!

Great. Just a quick question:

Slides from the information session are now on commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Information_session_for_Wikimedia%E2%80%99s_Google_Code-In_2016_new_mentors.pdf. I am sending a follow-up to our attendees in a bit, and will share with them these slides.

Was that sent only to people who attended ? Since there were loads more people who missed it (more than 70%), I hope it would've been sent to everyone in that calendar invite (I guess you did that already though).

@01tonythomas thank you for bringing this up! :) I just sent out an email to non-attendees!