On Apr 10, 2013, at 10:26 AM, Ulrich Stärk wrote:
> Folks, > > I perceive a low interest of our projects in GSoC. The list of projects that > submitted project ideas > that I compiled for Sally contained 33 entries of which some are subprojects > I believe. With 138 > PMCs plus 35 podlings, this is less than one fifth of our projects. > > We only had 34 ideas one week before our application was due. > For my two cents, GSOC has been a mixed result for me personally. I think I've mentored 4 times in the past. Two were successful, two were not (one time, the student simply went radio silent about 1/2 way through despite producing code all the way up to that point). I know others in Mahout had similar experiences where it was a mixed bag. For me, this year (and last), it simply was a matter of not having the time to commit to it, esp. in light of the fact that I couldn't reliably predict whether it would be successful or not, despite putting in a fair amount of due diligence up front, in fact more than I would even do for someone I was directly hiring. > I run into committers that are not members of their projects PMCs who are > eager to be mentors but > have no clue about what's going on because nobody from the PMC forwarded my > emails to their dev lists. > > So the problem seems twofold: no interest and not reaching the right people. > The latter could be > improved by simply sending to committers@ instead of pmcs@ but it's the first > that worries me. committers@ does seem like it would be better from an awareness POV. > > I believe GSoC and every other opportunity to attract new contributors to our > projects should be a > key priority of our PMCs. Apparently it's not, for whatever reasons. I could > think of missing > cycles, indifference, and wrong priorities. Perhaps, esp. for more popular projects, there is no shortage of contributors? I really don't know. Overall, I like GSOC and may do it again in the future, but it was too much time currently. > > So what could we do to increase awareness for the opportunities GSoC offers > and that this program is > important to the foundation? Write more emails? Ask the board to mandate a > section in board reports > detailing the project's GSoC endeavors? Any ideas? > I don't think mandating makes sense. We're all volunteers and if a PMC doesn't want to do GSOC then that is their choice. > Uli
