[fab] Google's Summer of Code 2006
Greg DeKoenigsberg
gdk at redhat.com
Mon Apr 17 14:48:52 UTC 2006
> 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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