Meeting minutes
Slideset: https://
<koalie> quoting from "discussion" slide:
<koalie> How does one connect students with standards groups? How much involvement is needed from mentors, and how do we make that sustainable? What are the incentives for standards groups and universities to participate? What kind of contributions can we expect students to make, and how scalable this could be? What kind of course structure supports this kind of work?
Fzio: people with disabilities serving institution licensed as a school. curriculum on digitial disability development.
Maybe have students participate at least observed so that they can learn about disability needs by osmosis.
Curious about tooling that students use: github, etc.?
Mikhail: The tooling is determined by the project.
Helix Oppotunity Institute is the name of the school Fazio referred to.
ficarra: Students exposed to collaboration across industry, timezones, cultural differences. Very valuable. Could scale that up by having student observers for many WGs.
fazio: Coralie is on video. Maybe she could bring to advisory board. There was an education and outreach group on accessibility. Other groups could benefit too from a broad education and outreach group.
<Zakim> koalie, you wanted to react to a previous speaker
Coralie: head of marketing and comms team W3C. Educ & outreach group's work has been subsumed. We should gather problem statements rather than craft solutions. Interested in what people think we should do re student inclusion but I have no solutions yet.
fazio: How do we provide more mentorship? What you've described is vocational training. Universities don't typically do that. This sounds like an onramp to vocational/practical training with pseudo-mentorship.
emilio: I work at Mozilla. Started on browsers in Uni. I wanted to do OSS work but getting a mentor (Josh Matthews, Mozilla) found me people to answer questions.
Mentoring experience was invaluable. We (mozilla?) have been collaborating with Unis in Canada. Doing something in Europe would be great. (CSS is not so cool as hacking on JS /jk) Sometimes meetings are not open, personally ok with more open meetings. More people should enjoy hacking on browsers.
Neha: I have worked in same environment for 5 years, IIT Delhi and collaboration with U Birmingham.
Four or five startups from assistive technologies lab with nat'l level impact in coop with gov't.
Involvement with mentors most important at every stage. From professors but also industry and users. In lab, 4 or 5 blind people involved and available during development.
Started initiative for practical training. Focus is disability, but approach might work for other focuses available.
eri: a student. Working on a real codebase is very important. Big difference from working on personal project. Learning to adapt to existing code taught alot. Finding the right mentor was tricky.
Q: what recommendations would you give to other universities starting a program like this?
mikhail: main factor that enables this work, our research group is a member of TC39 committee and I am personally involved. so we have access. Any university can do, because ECMA is free to join for Unis.
But, many universities do not see this industrial work as part of the educational chain. For 25 years+ we've been doing this.
Also, publication processes, you have to publish a lot. At our Uni (Bergen) less pressure to publish. Contributions to standard should be comparable to journal publication
ioana: I come from a Uni. I proposed something to Firefox and they wrote back and ??? /jk. The success is very dependant on the teachers and mentors which we can't control. But we can control how open we are to such interactions. Lesson from Capetown, South Africa bootcamp hackathon: the students understand that they could do that. In Mexico,
they had not become aware of that option. Internet is much more present today, but reachout to make clear that students have options to contribute.
Alex: Some organizations not trusted. Find the right people who are willing. Started with HBCUs in the US. Our foundation's mission: outreach. Went to South Africa to serve that part of the world and we found local connections that helped find volunteers who work with students day to day. Best bet: find people who work with students who can
relate. Outcome: up to five Universities, and now others are reaching out after three years of work.
(thanks)
ioana: Give emphasis on why standards are important. Emphasize that this work matters and that keeps them engaged.
fazio: easier to diagnose problems and easier to prevent problems. Students might not be major contributors to standards work. But there are other success criteria.
… : The CSS working group is happening on Github. Seeing the discussion happening outside meetings can give context that is missing if they just attend meetings.
fazio: agree. back to Coralie (Mercier)'s point: focus on problem statements over solutions at this stage.
ficarra: the mentor can backfill context to some degree
pchampin: I am assoc professor for 5 years. +1 on difficulties. First WG meetings are challenging, not just for students. Working past language barrier. My francophone students consider barrier too high. +1 on difficulty on convincing Unis of value of standards work relative to publication. I failed to keep my Uni as a W3 member org.
alex: what does it take to be considered a publication?
Is getting standards publications accreditted an option? As something that can go on a publication list.
mikhail: depends on the country/uni. It usually doesn't count towards many countries' ministries of education metrics that go into funding decisions.
alex: I got invited to fintech<->academia conferences. Academics more worried about getting datasets than where to publish. For W3, the data is available. Involving students on the research side might be an option.
mikhail: we are trying to balance research with implementation.
pchampin: I like the idea of student projects on the research. hackathon yesterday challenge on building a dashboard over W3C data.
fazio: language barriers shouldn't be a barrier (to pchampin). That's the real world. It is a practical experience. Best we can do is provide assistance. Incredibly worthwhile.
tom: I work at Chrome and at U (Leven?) in Belgium. Experience with being involved. Before I joined google, I was unaware of stds but was doing websec research. It was difficult that I could just open Github issues and just contact people. ??Should I reach out or open an issue?? What I noticed, easier to build connection if you've been
involved in W3C and gives confidence you've got the right people.
mikbar (mikhail): these courses tailored for enthusiastic students. This is on top of their other coursework. Easy to keep this going, I can identify students. If I had 200+ students, many would be unhappy.
We are establishing new class "Web Browsing Engineering" (book by P Pancheka & C Harrelson).
alex: what level of students?
mikhail: 2nd year with zero experience with JS up to students who know JS & Rust and systems memory mgmt. Yes, graduate students (called Masters in Norway)