Terri,

In reference to your questions below, I offer these comments:

(a) I enjoyed mentoring last summer and would like to do so again.
(b) We need to give this serious thought, particularly if we were to propose 
direct participation (rather than under the PSF umbrella). One of the 
weaknesses of MM3 as a GSoC project is a lack of design maturity in terms of 
the intercommunication structure between components of a distributed 
implementation. This causes the student to need to be more involved in design 
aspects rather than just coding. Some students would be up to the task, but 
others might be overwhelmed by the lack of a complete design structure. We need 
to identify (1) some "trivial" introductory tasks, (2) projects appropriate for 
GSoC that are already clearly designed, and perhaps (3) projects that still 
need design. If we consider a student for this third category, we need to not 
only make sure that the student understands to complexity of the task, but 
establish metrics that can be used to evaluate student performance.
(d) As a part of the student "proposal", I think that we need to have the 
students submit a "portfolio" of prior work which we can evaluate for aspects 
such as clear and consistent coding, unit testing, etc. At least some of this 
code should be written in Python (unless the student proposal would be 
implemented in another language). Potential applicants could be directed to the 
"trivial" tasks that I mention above as a source of material to augment their 
portfolio if they do not already have an adequate presentation.

Richard

On Jan 9, 2013, at 2:09 PM, Terri Oda <[email protected]> wrote:

> Happy new year, all!
> 
> Although this year's GSoC hasn't actually been announced yet, now's a good 
> time for us to start figuring out what we as an organization want to do.
> 
> So here's some questions to get us started:
> 
> (a) Who would like to mentor for GSoC 2013?
> 
> I'm hoping all of you who participated last year are interested in doing it 
> again, and I'm happy to take on a few more mentors if there's anyone new 
> who'd like to help out.
> 
> (b) What projects do we have that would be appropriate for students?
> 
> Generally we give students new features and wishlist items -- if someone has 
> time to do a quick scan of the bug queues for Mailman/postorius/hyperkitty 
> and suggest a list that would totally be awesome.
> 
> (c) What intro documentation do we need to make it easy for students to get 
> ramped up?
> 
> I'd like to see:
> - overview architecture documentation (probably drawn from Barry's book 
> chapter/pycon talk)
> - an updated "getting started" (basically the 5-minute guide expanded for 
> less experienced developers)
> - a VM image with everything set up for people to try (preferably Ubuntu)
> 
> Anything else you'd like to see?  Anyone want to offer to start on any of 
> these?  The VM image shouldn't be to hard to set up.
> 
> (d) What do we want student proposals to look like?
> 
> We talked last year about how we'd like to have a more consistent proposal 
> format for students to follow; can one of our more experienced admins write a 
> proposal template & guidelines that we can have ready?
> 
> 
> Terri
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