Hello, I am sending a few notes from GSoC mentor summit that are related to the GSoC project itself.
Although some of the topics may sound as "for mentors only", I decided to post here. First of all, some of the topics are related to contributing to HelenOS in general and also it might be interesting to hear opinion from the actual participants in this and previous GSoC. I know that some of the notes do not apply to the project of our size (compared with huge projects such as GNOME or LibreOffice) but maybe they can make think someone in a new direction. The notes are in no particular order and I tried hard to compress topics discussed on several sessions into a single block. The GNOME project has an initiative GNOME Love [1] targeted at getting new contributors to GNOME (or one of its thousands subprojects) and help them with their first steps. That has two parts. First, there are listed individual developers for each area to contact when in need for help. Next, some bugs has special keyword to mark them as suitable for beginners. Personally, I like idea of marking some tickets "for beginners" and I think this could work for us as well. Although new contributors do not appear each day, they usually ask the question "where do I start with coding?". And the answer to browse open tickets is not that helpful because the bugs does not have difficulty assigned. The priority category really does not help because, for example, both #382 [2] and #309 [3] are marked "minor" but definitely #382 is not suitable for the first contact with the sources while #309 could be. There were several discussion on the topic "reports". This year we (kind of) enforced weekly reports but it sometimes resulted in kind of false sense of progress while sometimes the reports were too big to get oriented in. We weren't the only one with similar problem. Different projects tackled this issue differently. From asking for the report every other week to the format "write whenever there is something" (even if it meant report every other day). Some projects required that the report should contain only three bullets. What was done since last report, what are the plans for following few days and what are the problems the student is currently experiencing. Other projects preferred reports in blog-post form (plus they often used some script to generate table similar to ours). Some project based the reporting on the Scrum approach and each student described his/her progress twice a week during short telco with his/her mentor. The sessions happened always at the same time and were kept as brief as possible (their format was kind of similar to the "three bullet report" above). It also seems that it is encouraging for students if they know that they would meet with their mentors and fellow students on some conference either during GSoC or after it. Some huge project has their own conference, some meet during general open-source conferences (such as FOSDEM). From what I have heard it is sometimes possible to ask Google to pay partially the traveling expenses. That's it, I will post some notes on OS-sessions in a separate e-mail. - Vojta [1] https://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove [2] http://trac.helenos.org/ticket/382 [3] http://trac.helenos.org/ticket/309 _______________________________________________ HelenOS-devel mailing list HelenOS-devel@lists.modry.cz http://lists.modry.cz/cgi-bin/listinfo/helenos-devel
