> 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 ------------------------------------------------------------- Greg DeKoenigsberg || Fedora Project || fedoraproject.org Be an Ambassador || http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Ambassadors -------------------------------------------------------------