[fab] Google's Summer of Code 2006

[Greg DeKoenigsberg]

> On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 18:11 -0500, Patrick W. Barnes wrote:
> > Last year, Google sponsored the Summer of Code program, which introduces 
> > collegiate students to open source development by connecting them with 
> > mentors and providing initiative.  The Fedora Project participated and 
> > provided mentoring for 12 projects.  These had mixed results but provided us 
> > with some valuable tools, including our Live CD generator and a tool that 
> > we're currently working on adding to our infrastructure to gather hardware 
> > usage information from our users.
> > 
> > Google has just announced that they will sponsor the event again this year.  
> > Will we participate again?

I talked with Chris DiBona last week, and gave him the tentative nod on 
Fedora's behalf.  We've obviously got some planning work to do.

The nice thing: last year we agreed to do SoC on, like, June 2nd.  So at 
least we've got some time to plan this year.

> > I'd really like for us to work on this program again.  It is a valuable 
> > opportunity to bring new contributors to our project and to support an 
> > awesome program.  This year, I think we can better involve our contributors 
> > in the process, gathering more volunteers to help in the mentoring and to 
> > provide suggestions and feedback.  Last year, the burden of the program 
> > rested almost entirely upon Elliot.

I see the Mentoring project perhaps taking off as a direct result.  If we 
do it right.

> > One of the people who was accepted for the program last year was
> > actually a co-worker of mine, and I enjoyed the opportunity to help
> > someone get started with open source in such a fashion.  His results
> > were not ideal, and I have been disappointed with his failure to
> > follow-up, but a program like this is always going to have a few
> > participants that don't measure up.  I'd very much enjoy the
> > opportunity to work with the program again, hopefully with better
> > results.  As a bonus, every student that we mentor will bring $500 for
> > our participation.  That $500 per student could be a valuable addition
> > to our budget.
> 
> Last time many of the projects that we choose to pursue within Google
> SoC were those that required ongoing development and maintenance rather
> than simple independent tasks and pretty much all of them have failed
> miserably.  If we are participating this year we should identify very
> specific tasks that people can do and walk away from and still be
> beneficial. 

Yep.  In general, I think we need to do a better job of specifying small 
projects that could add big value for us.  And actually understanding the 
difference between "small projects" and "not at all small projects" will 
help.  :)

Some ideas off the top of my head:

* It would be nice to move the ball forward on Pootypedia, a project from 
last year's SoC that never took off like it should have.  Maybe it's 
actually done and just needs to be deployed and used -- but I'm guessing 
it's not that simple. (Check it out at http://pootypedia.sourceforge.net/)

* Depending on how the RT deploy goes, it might be useful to have a 
queueing mechanism for the Freemedia project -- a simple way for people to 
be able to push media requests onto a stack, and then have various 
Freemedia volunteers cleaim the ones they're fulfilling.

I'm sure there's tons of other ideas.  It's probably time to start 
collecting them somewhere central.

--g

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