I think it could be useful to learn from other projects' handling of SoC. The FFmpeg project has a list of "qualification tasks" for the students to complete before they can accepted into SoC, as you can see From [1].
The tasks are minor tasks that don't require a lot of time at hand, but gives a good way to judge if the person is in for the experience or the money, and might be able to cut the deal even for Gentoo devs if that is really wanted. How to implement it for Gentoo? Well I think we have the tool already: Bugzilla. We just need to add a keyword SOC_QUALIFICATION_TASK; when a developer think of a working qualification task, he can add the keyword and CC the soc team or something like that. Then the users can deal with the problems whenever they want, for the next SoC, even during the year. When they submit their application, we ask users to put the link to the bug that represented the qualification task they completed. To make the checking more easy, we could make sure that the person who completed the task is listed in the Whiteboard, and that only Gentoo devs can change that for the bugs for qualification task (letting only devs opening them, or cloning the feature requests from user that become a SoC qualification task, for instance). Then get a tracker that is blocked by all the SoC qualification task bugs, monitored by the SoC team, that can make sure how stuff is going with the qualification tasks, and finally add a default query for the tasks to the documentation about SoC. I'm sure we can easily get some qualification tasks on; with a bit more work we might also get qualification points (so that for instance minor tasks alone can't cut the deal). Maybe a bit complex, but I think it might be worth discussing. [1] http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=FFmpeg_Summer_Of_Code_2008 -- Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò http://blog.flameeyes.eu/
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