Hi Andrea, all... On 4/5/2011 6:44 PM, Andrea Schweer wrote: > Ok, sounds good to me -- I haven't mentored GSoC projects before and so > I'm not entirely sure about what's realistically achievable in one. >
Just a few comments on GSoC project scope: In past years, we've often found that more tightly scoped GSoC projects are best. It allows the student to actually complete the project within the summer. If the student is especially fast and completes the project early, we can always expand the scope slightly (e.g. in the case of this project, if all Submission UI usability changes were completed early, we could expand to make additional usability improvements to other areas of the DSpace UI). However, if the project is too large to begin with, it can sometimes end up in a semi-incomplete state, which requires additional support even after GSoC (from committers or the student him/herself). For some GSoC projects, this is unavoidable (as some projects are more difficult to break down into smaller chunks). But, when possible, it is generally best to avoid large project scopes, or at least figure out ways to break down the project into smaller chunks. That way, both the student & mentor (and our committers) can feel the project was successful, even if only a portion of those 'smaller chunks' were completed during GSoC. > > In addition to the usability studies, it may also be worthwhile to ask > dspace repository managers (eg via the dspace-general mailing list) what > issues they encounter frequently, or to go through the dspace mailing > list archives and look for e-mails that indicate usability issues with > the submission UI (eg a very recent e-mail to dspace-tech: > http://web.archiveorange.com/archive/v/hxciqKvsiLQklYim436e). I think this is a great idea! Assuming a student application is accepted for this project, it would be good to create a separate project page in the Wiki to begin to gather these usability issues. We can then encourage participation of repository managers (or the DSpace Community Advisory Team, which is primarily repository managers) to help us to fill out a listing of usability tasks to complete over the summer. I think both Andrea & Peter have provided a good start to this list of various usability issues -- much of the points they've mentioned are common requests I've also heard. Obviously, if this list starts to get rather long, we'd also need to "rank" them in some general order, so that the student would have a better sense of importance of various issues, etc. - Tim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Xperia(TM) PLAY It's a major breakthrough. An authentic gaming smartphone on the nation's most reliable network. And it wants your games. http://p.sf.net/sfu/verizon-sfdev _______________________________________________ Dspace-devel mailing list Dspace-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/dspace-devel
