On Tue, May 04, 2010 at 02:34:49PM -0700, Noy wrote: > Hello all. > > There are a few things we need to discuss. Financially we're probably > able to support between four to six 5000 dollar scholarships, > depending on a few variables like future sales and the location of the > candidates (Non-US candidates cost more due to witholding tax.) The > number of scholarships isn't so much an issue, but how we allocate > them can be. In discussions with Dave and some of the other developers > we'd like to broaden the range of the scholarships. As with last year > we should have a significant number of art scholarships. In addition, > Dave has also suggested we offer a WML specific scholarship to promote > new UMC game content. I think this is an excellent idea, which should > add more game content and exploit some of the technical improvements > that have been made on the programming side.
Sounds interesting the do WML specific sholarships, only how hard is it to set goals for it. > Now I'd like to consider a third type of scholarship, which I know > maybe slightly controversial but I think could be quite beneficial for > the program. I'd like one of the scholarships to be offered to female > developers. I believe one of the most attractive aspects of wesnoth's > development community is its inclusiveness. The program is translated > to a number of languages and we offer development opportunities to a > wide range of skills sets and different levels. That was partly the > intent behind the art scholarship last year; we attempted to draw in > greater contributions from individuals not typically involved in open > source development (artists.) A examination of open source community > shows that women are highly underrepresented in the field, which is > unfortunate. I believe that we're well placed to work on this area. We > already have some excellent contributions from women developers, such > as kitty, and I'd like to build on that. I think the idea of adding a scholarship for female students is great. > I think its also important to note that I think we should retain > strong standards on quality and organization for this scholarship. I > don't think we should lax our standards, but instead offer a strong > incentive towards women developers to come and contribute to our > game. As Wesnoth is already a fairly inclusive and positive > environment and this would be an easy way to show that to the world. > I think its also important that we state that we're looking for > someone who would be interested in long term participation with the > program, not something that will end after they are paid. This program > would also benefit the open source community in general by promoting > women developers in general. Agreed that we should retain our standards. > Some nuts and bolts issues. To attract candidates I propose > approaching some of the women programming organizations and blogs and > informing them of what we're trying to achieve. I'm sure most would be > willing to post about it. There is one issue with my proposal which > needs a bit of work; we're bereft of mentors due to GSOC. I'm hoping > that someone who isn't part of GSOC might be able to help. I see the lack of mentoring power as a serious problem for this project. IMO, like for GSoC, we need a full-time mentor for this project and everybody volunteered to mentor for GSoC is already mentoring a GSoC project. > Alternatively we might make this less of a mentorship scholarship > (like GSOC) and simply a straight scholarship with minimal > supervision. I think this is a bad idea. We offer a scholarship, a project for somebody to learn something, which means we need somebody to guide that person. IMO it also gives a bad signal if we try to attract a female student and then don't have the time to guide her like we do with the GSoC students. (Not to mention we want to reimburse their work with a nice sum of money.) So IMO we need to either find a mentor to do it or postpone the female scholarship project. If we postpone the project until after GSoC we don't have to mentor the GSoC students and it would be easier to find a mentor (I would volunteer). Of course it's aimed to be a summer project, but on the southern hemisphere the summer is when it's winter on the northern hemisphere. So with postponing it, it would give a better chance to these students (a problem they often have with the normal GSoC project as well). -- Regards, Mark de Wever aka Mordante/SkeletonCrew _______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
