Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?
On Mon, 2014-09-15 at 09:08 +0200, Christophe Fergeau wrote: > Hey Michael, > > On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 07:15:42PM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote: > > It would also be good to actually consider the value of student projects > > before funding them. With GSoC we just picked which students seemed most > > likely to successfully complete the projects they proposed, rather than > > actually evaluating which projects were most important to GNOME. > > Most of the GSoC projects we get proposals for are ideas which were > suggested by mentors/members of the GNOME projects on > https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreach/SummerOfCode/2014/Ideas > Students are also encouraged to come up with their own project ideas, > but in this case we insist that this must be discussed with the project > maintainers first to make sure that this is something that is useful to > the project. Then there are indeed some (a few!) more experimental > projects that we pick because the student seems good, and this could > have an interesting outcome, but we don't pick a lot of such projects > each year. Yes, but I don't think that process is sufficient. Some of the projects that get accepted seem to be of significantly higher value to GNOME than others. Others are important, but not really enough to merit the entire stipend. > > I think we got a good set of students, but I'd rather select a > > promising student while rejecting the student's project proposal if > > the proposal is only tangential to our interests. > > You seem to imply we should reorient good students on more important > projects if what they propose does not seem very useful? Yes! Within reason; we don't want to push students to work on projects they're not interested in, but we also don't want to fund them to work on something that's largely tangential to our interests. > One thing to > keep in mind about GSoC is that we don't know in advance whether the > student will manage to complete their project during summer or not. This > means it's generally preferrable not to push students to work on > features which _must_ be in the next GNOME release, as we may then > realize very close to code freeze that this very important feature is > not going to be completed by the student in time for the release. I agree. It's better for GSoC/OPW projects to focus on achieving a non-urgent goal. This is already the case for all, or almost all, of our projects, though. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: Minutes of the Board meeting of August 29th, 2014
> > Their terms of service [1] are also highly questionable. They reserve > > the right to take all the money in our account, or cancel our bounties > > without refunding our money, at any time and without any explanation, > > without cause or notice (section 6.5). "Without cause" seems like a > > pretty good place for us to draw a line > > Daniel Foré should probably be the one who we should alert. OK, I've CCed Daniel to make sure he's aware about the issues with Bountysource's ToS. It's probably not a huge risk, but it would not be fun to be wrong about that > We don't > use it ourselves. However, I am intrigued if people believe that we > should put out bounties? What I get a lot of times and you've seen > this yourselves is that a lot of bugs are complex and takes a lot of > intimate knowledge of the GTK+ or GNOME stack. Would it be effective? > > sri I think it could be effective, but it's something that would really require strategic discussion to decide which bugs to place bounties on, and how large the bounty. Presumably we would get better at this with experience. I suspect that the most effective approach would be to identify high-profile bugs that are not attracting sufficient developer attention (e.g. the bad search experience in nautilus), and try to guess the appropriate amount of money that will incentivize work on the bug. Adam's $400 bounty for what appeared to be a simple crash actually required digging into the webkitgtk+ sandboxing code, which basically limited the bug to those who already have at least some webkit experience. It did work in the end when it attracted my attention, but that took a while. My $150 bounty on the gnome-shell desktop background bug hasn't been successful yet; it probably wasn't large enough to motivate anyone unfamiliar with gnome-shell to look into the problem. I figured a smaller amount of money would be appropriate since it's probably a fairly simple issue and I pointed out a commit that I thought was wrong. Maybe someone will work on it in the end, but I have a feeling it will end up being solved by an experienced gnome-shell developer, and I guess the bounty will probably not be significant motivation for doing so. My $250 bounty on the gnome-shell calendar bug seems to have been just right, though: that bug wasn't getting any attention and wouldn't have been fixed without the bounty, and now it's very likely to be resolved soon. signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?
Hi. On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 02:57:20PM +0200, Sébastien Wilmet wrote: > Like the Linux Foundation, the GNOME Foundation could hire one or more > developers. It has been mentioned already that this is not a valid analogy, but even it was, I don't think this will happen in the (near) future. I think the Foundation's goal must be to enable the community to develop great Free Software, not do the actual development. Cheers, Tobi ___ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org https://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list
