On Tue, Aug 25, 2009 at 5:38 PM, C. Titus Brown <[email protected]> wrote:

> On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 05:30:53PM -0400, Mel Chua wrote:
> -> One question that's coming increasingly to my mind: "Where do the
> -> students go?" Students who not only contribute to open source in their
> -> spare time, but want to help their fellow students get into it too - and
> -> see working through their colleges and courses as the best way to do it
> -> - but who may not have a supportive professor driving TOS forward at
> -> their institution yet.
> ->
> -> http://danielsmw.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/seasons-of-code
> ->
> -> "When I joined the Fedora Project last year, it was a pretty big deal to
> -> me. A college freshman, I?d used Linux for a few years and enjoyed it
> -> but never really contributed anything back upstream except for the
> -> occasional automated bug report.
> ->
> -> A year later, I?m very glad I got involved in open source. But I know
> -> plenty of very smart people about my age ? oftentimes people I think
> -> would be even better at this stuff than I am ? who don?t join projects
> -> or contribute back upstream for no reason other than that it?s not
> -> easily accessible for them."
> ->
> -> Thoughts?
>
> Hi Mel,
>
> I ran Python's GHOP (Google Highly Open Participation) project, which
> was quite successful (we had people begging us to take more tasks from
> them, by the end!) and I see a big flaw in this proposal:
>
> """
> What if there was a web community where hackers could post jobs of
> various difficulty or depth with the intent of having students pick them
> up?
> """
>
> It's *really* *hard* *work* ;).  Just coming up with clearly specified,
> well laid out, appropriately targetted tasks was *hard* (the bureaucracy
> surrounding GHOP made it even more work than that, but hopefully that
> will be helped by Melange).
>
> So while it's a great idea, (IMO) getting something like this off the
> ground is going to take an immense amount of energy.  I'm personally
> hoping that Google will run GHOP again, so that we (Python/PSF) can use
> that as a leaping off point to catalyze this in the future.
>


We will be running GHOP again this year, think launch (meaning start letting
students get to work) in December though that's not final yet.

To make that happen we need help with the Melange code base,
http://code.google.com/p/soc/

We had a Summer of Code student do a tremendous amount of work to make GHOP
possible this year but some integration work and definitely testing is
greatly needed.

If anyone is interested in helping make GHOP a reality this year please send
a note to [email protected]. Lennard de Rijk is the project lead
and can give guidance on what integration still needs to happen and other
features that would be useful.

Cheers,
LH

-- 
Leslie Hawthorn
http://www.hawthornlandings.org
http://identi.ca/lh
http://www.twitter.com/lhawthorn
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