Some thoughts about next GSoC

[Kai Blin]

Hi folks,

from what we discussed at the last WineConf, we wanted to work on our 
procedures for the Google Summer of Code a little.
I'm sending this email in hope to start some discussion about this, so we have 
it out of the way until the 2008 version is announced so we can talk about 
proposed projects then.

The goal of Wine's SoC procedures should be to get high-quality proposals that 
can be completed by the student proposing the project in the time allocated 
for GSoC, so both scope and difficulty should be checked.
I haven't been on the mentoring side of things, but my understanding from the 
WineConf side of things was that we had some problems getting this right the 
past years.

I was thinking about strongly encouraging people to post their project 
proposal to wine-devel prior to applying, so more developers can have a look 
at it and see if it's doable or not and offer suggestions.

I know some projects did an introductory quiz to figure out the student's 
coding skills, I'm not convinced the knowledge needed for Wine can be tested 
in a quiz. What do you think?

Another thing that didn't turn out too well last time is that it was really 
hard to figure out what was going on during the summer. I have a few ideas on 
how we could address this.

Lots of other projects had their student write a weekly public progress 
report. I think we should require the same. This will probably help keeping 
people updated, and might help spotting problems early.

According to the wiki page, we already require a post-mortem report on the 
project, however I can't remember seeing much of those this year. We should 
make sure those are written next time. We might think of a better name for 
the report, post-mortem sounds like the project is dead after the summer, we 
want people to keep working.

Last year, some of the students set up a public git repo on repo.or.cz. I was 
thinking about making that a requirement for next year. This would allow 
people to review work in progress.

Comments?
Kai

-- 
Kai Blin
WorldForge developer  http://www.worldforge.org/
Wine developer        http://wiki.winehq.org/KaiBlin
Samba team member     http://www.samba.org/samba/team/
--
Will code for cotton.
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