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Posted to dev@community.apache.org by Grant Ingersoll <gs...@apache.org> on 2011/03/16 21:59:51 UTC
Univ. Field Experience
I've been talking with a Prof. at a local university who heads up their Field Experience (FE) program and was mentioning that some of the projects I work on (most notably Open Relevance Project, Lucene, Mahout, OpenNLP) would fit really nicely with what his students are learning as part of their degree program. The FE is a 3 credit course that requires 135 hours of work for the semester with a "site" (i.e. company, non-profit, etc.) In many ways, it is akin to the GSOC in that it requires a mentor that the student works with. I'd like to throw my hat in as a FE opportunity, but it requires an official entity to be the "site". Thus, the email here. I'd like the ASF to be the entity. I don't think it requires anything of the ASF other than for recording purposes the University needs to know who the site is. I would be the assigned Mentor.
What do others here think about pursuing this? Do I need Board approval? I think as an Officer of the ASF I can do some of this, but want to make sure I'm proceeding correctly.
Cheers,
Grant
Re: Univ. Field Experience
Posted by Grant Ingersoll <gs...@apache.org>.
Here's what I submitted:
Site Name: (it's the only address I could find!)
Apache Software Foundation
Dept. 9660, Los Angeles,
CA 90084-9660, U.S.A.
---------------------------------
Contact:
Grant Ingersoll
VP, Apache Lucene
gsingers@apache.org
(For Lucene/Solr, Mahout, OpenNLP and Open Relevance projects)
Those interested in other ASF related projects can subscribe to the dev@community.apache.org mailing list (send an email to dev-subscribe@community.apache.org and follow the instructions.)
---------------------------------
Please list some characteristics of your site:
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is one of the preeminent open source software providers in the world. The ASF has over 80 different projects and over 2000 volunteer committers, producing a wide range of software from the HTTPD Server that powers much of the web to the likes of Hadoop, Lucene, Solr, Mahout and Tomcat. We are almost totally a volunteer driven organization where people can contribute as they see fit to help a project. We do almost all of our collaboration online via email, IRC, etc. In many ways, I suspect we are unlike most any other organization that has submitted here, as we don't have bosses and we all volunteer to contribute.
As for the projects I'm interested in, Lucene is the preeminent open source search library on the planet today. It is used in a large number of applications and services ranging from mobile devices to sites powering 1 billion plus searches a day. Solr is a platform on top of Lucene that makes it easy for people to use Lucene's power without as much programming. Mahout is a relatively new project focused on scalable machine learning algorithms for clustering, classification and recommendations, amongst other topics. OpenNLP is a library focused on natural language processing tasks like part of speech tagging, named entity recognition and others.
---------------------------------
What tasks can your intern expect to perform?:
There are a couple things that I am specifically looking for, but there are also broader opportunities for anyone to contribute to any project at the ASF. I am happy to direct people on where to go for the latter and can likely point them at potential mentors, but really am here to focus on the former, as that is what I intend to mentor on.
Specifically, I am looking for a couple of different things:
1. One or more people to help define and build out a set of corpora (publicly available, with no intellectual property encumbrances), relevance judgments, queries, etc. for testing search engines and machine learning algorithms such as Lucene, Mahout, OpenNLP and possible others via the Open Relevance Project (ORP -- http://lucene.apache.org/openrelevance/) If you are familiar with the Text Retrieval Evaluation Conference (TREC), you can think of ORP as an open source TREC set of evaluations. Collections can range from traditional texts (email, articles, web crawls, etc.) to ecommerce to spatial (local search -- such as open street map). I'm looking for someone who has the vision to put forth ideas and bring them to fruition. You don't have to be able to code, but it would be helpful.
2. One or more people to build out an open relevance evaluation web tool for capturing relevance experiments, evaluating them using common measures such as precision/recall, mean reciprocal rank, normalized discounted gain, etc. Again, the successful candidate will have the opportunity to put forth a vision for what such a tool should be and then work to make it happen. This opportunity requires programming skills, preferably in Java, but other languages can be considered.
3. Lucene, Solr, Mahout and OpenNLP are always looking for contributions in terms of code, documentation, evaluation, etc. See the respective project websites (http://lucene.apache.org, http://mahout.apache.org and http://incubator.apache.org/opennlp) for more information on the projects and then feel free to propose ideas.
4. I'm sure other ASF projects would be willing to entertain other ideas.
All work will be done in an open source fashion. All technical ideas/questions/discussions will take place on public mailing lists. Personal issues will be handled by me as the site supervisor. Thus, the intern will not only learn valuable real world skills that may be useful to large audiences of people but they will also gain intimate knowledge of how open source projects are built.
---------------------------------
-Grant
On Mar 17, 2011, at 9:33 AM, Ross Gardler wrote:
> On 17/03/2011 13:20, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 16, 2011, at 8:25 PM, Ross Gardler wrote:
>>>
>>>> Do I need Board approval? I think as an Officer of the ASF I can
>>>> do some of this, but want to make sure I'm proceeding correctly.
>>>
>>> No need to bother the Board. It's in our charter to provide
>>> whatever support you need. It's nice to have a real test case to
>>> flesh out the ideas here at the ASF.
>>
>> Specifically, I need to fill out the form at
>> http://sils.unc.edu/programs/field-experience/new-site-form
>>
>> I would like to fill out the Site Name and Address as the ASF and my
>> name as the site supervisor. Does that seem OK?
>
> I don't see any reference to terms and conditions or other such legal stuff. Assuming that this form does not bind us in any way to anything we don't already offer through ComDev then that's fine. As far as I'm concerned you can go ahead with this on a lazy consensus basis.
>
> Who do you plan to put down under:
>
> "Contact information for site supervisor (include name, title, e-mail, and phone number): "
>
> In many ways I think that should be this list. We have a list of projects that are suitable for students and I'd like to make these available to SILS. Putting ComDev down means you don't have to worry about approaches from people in other areas.
>
> On the other hand, the definition of "site supervisor" [1] is that of a mentor in our language. The responsibilities are very similar to those of our mentors (in fact I think I'll steal the couple that are missing in our definition of a mentor)
>
> Perhaps the best way forward is for you to do it this year as "site supervisor" and, if you feel it is appropriate, link them to ComDev to explore a more complete offering from the ASF as a whole.
>
> Ross
>
> [1] http://sils.unc.edu/programs/field-experience/roles-and-responsibilities#site-supervisor
Re: Univ. Field Experience
Posted by Grant Ingersoll <gs...@apache.org>.
On Mar 17, 2011, at 9:33 AM, Ross Gardler wrote:
> On 17/03/2011 13:20, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
>>
>> On Mar 16, 2011, at 8:25 PM, Ross Gardler wrote:
>>>
>>>> Do I need Board approval? I think as an Officer of the ASF I can
>>>> do some of this, but want to make sure I'm proceeding correctly.
>>>
>>> No need to bother the Board. It's in our charter to provide
>>> whatever support you need. It's nice to have a real test case to
>>> flesh out the ideas here at the ASF.
>>
>> Specifically, I need to fill out the form at
>> http://sils.unc.edu/programs/field-experience/new-site-form
>>
>> I would like to fill out the Site Name and Address as the ASF and my
>> name as the site supervisor. Does that seem OK?
>
> I don't see any reference to terms and conditions or other such legal stuff. Assuming that this form does not bind us in any way to anything we don't already offer through ComDev then that's fine. As far as I'm concerned you can go ahead with this on a lazy consensus basis.
>
> Who do you plan to put down under:
>
> "Contact information for site supervisor (include name, title, e-mail, and phone number): "
>
> In many ways I think that should be this list. We have a list of projects that are suitable for students and I'd like to make these available to SILS. Putting ComDev down means you don't have to worry about approaches from people in other areas.
>
> On the other hand, the definition of "site supervisor" [1] is that of a mentor in our language. The responsibilities are very similar to those of our mentors (in fact I think I'll steal the couple that are missing in our definition of a mentor)
>
> Perhaps the best way forward is for you to do it this year as "site supervisor" and, if you feel it is appropriate, link them to ComDev to explore a more complete offering from the ASF as a whole.
+1
Re: Univ. Field Experience
Posted by Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>.
On 17/03/2011 13:20, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
>
> On Mar 16, 2011, at 8:25 PM, Ross Gardler wrote:
>>
>>> Do I need Board approval? I think as an Officer of the ASF I can
>>> do some of this, but want to make sure I'm proceeding correctly.
>>
>> No need to bother the Board. It's in our charter to provide
>> whatever support you need. It's nice to have a real test case to
>> flesh out the ideas here at the ASF.
>
> Specifically, I need to fill out the form at
> http://sils.unc.edu/programs/field-experience/new-site-form
>
> I would like to fill out the Site Name and Address as the ASF and my
> name as the site supervisor. Does that seem OK?
I don't see any reference to terms and conditions or other such legal
stuff. Assuming that this form does not bind us in any way to anything
we don't already offer through ComDev then that's fine. As far as I'm
concerned you can go ahead with this on a lazy consensus basis.
Who do you plan to put down under:
"Contact information for site supervisor (include name, title, e-mail,
and phone number): "
In many ways I think that should be this list. We have a list of
projects that are suitable for students and I'd like to make these
available to SILS. Putting ComDev down means you don't have to worry
about approaches from people in other areas.
On the other hand, the definition of "site supervisor" [1] is that of a
mentor in our language. The responsibilities are very similar to those
of our mentors (in fact I think I'll steal the couple that are missing
in our definition of a mentor)
Perhaps the best way forward is for you to do it this year as "site
supervisor" and, if you feel it is appropriate, link them to ComDev to
explore a more complete offering from the ASF as a whole.
Ross
[1]
http://sils.unc.edu/programs/field-experience/roles-and-responsibilities#site-supervisor
Re: Univ. Field Experience
Posted by Grant Ingersoll <gs...@apache.org>.
On Mar 16, 2011, at 8:25 PM, Ross Gardler wrote:
>
>> Do I need Board
>> approval? I think as an Officer of the ASF I can do some of this,
>> but want to make sure I'm proceeding correctly.
>
> No need to bother the Board. It's in our charter to provide whatever support you need. It's nice to have a real test case to flesh out the ideas here at the ASF.
Specifically, I need to fill out the form at http://sils.unc.edu/programs/field-experience/new-site-form
I would like to fill out the Site Name and Address as the ASF and my name as the site supervisor. Does that seem OK?
-Grant
Re: Univ. Field Experience
Posted by Ross Gardler <rg...@apache.org>.
On 16/03/2011 20:59, Grant Ingersoll wrote:
> I've been talking with a Prof. at a local university who heads up
> their Field Experience (FE) program and was mentioning that some of
> the projects I work on (most notably Open Relevance Project, Lucene,
> Mahout, OpenNLP) would fit really nicely with what his students are
> learning as part of their degree program. The FE is a 3 credit
> course that requires 135 hours of work for the semester with a "site"
> (i.e. company, non-profit, etc.) In many ways, it is akin to the
> GSOC in that it requires a mentor that the student works with. I'd
> like to throw my hat in as a FE opportunity, but it requires an
> official entity to be the "site". Thus, the email here. I'd like
> the ASF to be the entity. I don't think it requires anything of the
> ASF other than for recording purposes the University needs to know
> who the site is. I would be the assigned Mentor.
>
> What do others here think about pursuing this?
We're already doing it in two ways, at least in theory.
Option 1
========
I'm participating in an EU funded project that is providing open source
mentoring in formal education courses. "the site" is not the ASF in this
instance as the students can work with other open source projects. "the
site" is http://opense.net/
However, the site is currently undergoing a redesign for the second
pilot which is about to change.
The advantages of the OpenSE route is that they provide learning
assistant who helps with core skills so the mentor can focus on project
specific stuff. Unfortunately, we only had three students approach the
ASF on the first pilot and none of them actually delivered a project.
You could point the Prof. at this project. Although you might want to
ask me privately about the pros and cons of this first.
Option 2
========
At the ASF we have outlined how we might provide mentoring in formal
education at http://community.apache.org/mentorprogrammeformaleducation.html
We'd be happy for you to provide the mentoring under these terms (which
are open to clarification/discussion etc.) In particular I would like to
draw your attention to the role of the Tutor/Prof. in this:
Tutors
* Ensure the mentee is participating in the program
* Tutor grades the student within their formal education (the
mentor feedback should assist here)
* Take full responsibility for the learners moivation and progress
** Mentors will guide but will not motivate
In other words the ASF and its committers take no responsibility for the
success of the student. We'll mentor but nothing more.
> Do I need Board
> approval? I think as an Officer of the ASF I can do some of this,
> but want to make sure I'm proceeding correctly.
No need to bother the Board. It's in our charter to provide whatever
support you need. It's nice to have a real test case to flesh out the
ideas here at the ASF.
Ross