[snipping out previous conversation due to its length]
Here are my thoughts on the mentorship discussion. Im just throwing out ideas, to further this discussion:
1. I think its an excellent idea. I have seen a similar setup for engineering students in american universities, called MentorNet. Their website (www.mentornet.net) has quite some useful information which we could use to further solidify this idea.
2. I believe that we may need to start small and work with one or two campuses in maybe a couple of cities to see how it goes, but going all out and having a global list of mentors and proteges willing to participate will probably give it a better value. Lets say we have a couple of mentors willing to overlook a project in say, networks, living in Delhi. There's a student who's gone from delhi to a karnataka REC for his engineering, and would definitely like the idea of doing his required project AND be able to stay at home for that duration at the same time. For such a student, being able to pair up with a mentor in delhi would be a good idea. The student might have other reasons for going to another place too. Now lets take this scenario to a global level. A student in germany wishes to work on a specific project for his research, but the mentors for that kind of a project are not available in germany, and he struggles on without much help. With the help of this kind of a mentor network, he might be able to locate a willing mentor in another country too, and if he's willing to bear the cost of travel etc., he may even travel to get his work done. Maybe even get to see a new place that way. The point is access to a global list is vital.
3. I like the idea of having a committee to decide on basic things and settle disputes, confusions etc. Just to get more visibility, we could make sure we have representatives from large corporations like IBM, Sony, Novell etc which support Open Source, to be a part of this committee. Moreover, we can set up a model of sponsorship with these and other firms, by providing them a platform to pick proteges that perform well. This also in turn becomes a motivating factor for more proteges to join in and perform better, in order to get a chance of campus-recruitment style of landing a job.
4. It would be nice if this committee could regulate the "domains" of projects. Lets say, internationalisation, communication, collaboration, operating systems etc could be the kind of domains, and have a single domain manager. The domain manager acts as a project manager for each of the mentor-protege pair within that domain. This takes out the administrative tasks from the mentor and protege, and they can concentrate on getting the tasks done, while the domain manager ensures that things are on track for each of the mentor-protege pair.
5. We may even need a team of volunteers that oversee the advertising, marketing etc of this sort of a network, and talk to companies, and universities to start recognizing the mentorship that students receive from such a set up
These were just some of the thoughts i had about this before i got interrupted with loads of work :) Will continue on this if other people chip in, and we thrash out more ideas.
regards, Gami
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