Develop IXP Best Practices Documentation

I work on Federal Gov't projects that often have requirements that would prevent use of an intern or inexperienced person on a project. However I see a possibility where a federal project could define a module or Feature request to an existing module they need and then practicing Contrib First a mentor working with a few IXPs (the Contribution Corps) takes them through an Agile process to build the module. When the module is complete, the Federal project uses it. In this way the IXPs do not have to be "on the Federal project as personnel." They would still get plenty of experience, as well as contribution credit.

*This model could actually work for any agency and client, not just the Gov't.

Benefits to IXP intern

• Legitimate experience for the IXP
• Working on actual issues, with real-life requirements (no fiction)
• Contribution credit
• Possible maintanership of a module
• Fully immersed in participating publicly in the Drupal community and project space.

Benefits supporting company

• Working on things actually needed for clients
• Leading.mentoring the "Contribution Corps" is a great place for Jr.Sr engineers to learn being a tech lead
• Participating in the Contribution Corps is a great way for UX/Design staff to get a better understanding of how to work within Drupal more on the side of the admin theme.
• Contribution credit for the commits in addition to those provided by the IXP program.
• The IXP required case study is going to carry a lot of weight as it will be about contributing something legitimate that is guaranteed to be used by a Gov't client

Concerns

• Avoid the perception that this is taking advantage of cheap labor or somehow off-shoring the work.
• For paying the IXPs, this is likely better suited to "fixed price contracts" where personnel are not billing specific hours, because they can't bill if they aren't listed on the contract
• After investing time and energy into the IXP candidate, even if the candidate did very well, We might not be able to offer a position because they might not meet requirements for being placed on a contract project.

Should we split this issue into two issues, one for hiring organizations and one for the IXP themselves? (I think so.)

-mike

I'm changing the title of this issue so that we have separate issues for best practices documentation for employers and employees (IXPs.)

-mike

@camoa and I have information from @horncologne and @flux423 that needs to be synthesized and added here.

-mike

@swirt - I'm putting together a "case studies" page for IXP. Is there any chance that you can turn your comment 3 above into a blog post somewhere? Ideally, it would be on https://medium.com/civicactions...

I would love to see the link to https://guidebook.civicactions.com/en/latest/common-practices-tools/cont... highlighted as well.

Thoughts?

thanks,
-mike

@ultimike
I don't know if it could be a case study... it is more of an idea that has not been put into practice yet. (Contrib First has been practiced, but not the IXP participants part). I'll discuss a blog post a bit more within CivicActions. Unfortunately the climate in the Federal workspace is not the same as it was a few months back.

@swirt Understood. I definitely think we need to somehow include content from your comment 3 above, and the Contrib First link, in our best practices document.

I might just copy/paste parts of your comment directly into the draft version of the best practices doc for now...

-mike

Initial best practices document published: https://www.drupal.org/node/3516295 →

Is there any reason not to close this issue?

-mike