On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:36 PM, Aryeh Gregor <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 7:27 PM, Danese Cooper <[email protected]> wrote: >> The deadline for application from Open Source Projects to Google Summer >> of Code 2010 is looming (in about 48 hours), and I'm coordinating the >> formal Wikimedia Foundation entry. There has already been some >> excellent discussion on >> http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2010 but *we definitely >> need more mentors*. > > Unfortunately, I can't guarantee this summer that I'll have enough > time to commit to this, with my academic obligations. I might be able > to serve as a secondary mentor to help out one or more students when > I'm around, if there are projects that are close to my > interests/knowledge. I could volunteer to mentor a student who > already has another mentor who can commit full-time if necessary, in > other words. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
I'm with Aryeh on this one. I can't really commit to full-time being able to mentor someone--I have work, school, et cetera--but I'm around often enough to be able to lend a hand or two if needed. Plus if we get our students on IRC, they'll have the benefit of real-time feedback from many developers, not just their mentor. I'm also with Trevor in saying that I'd only like to work on projects that have some tangible benefit to a larger group of people (ie: deployed on WMF sites, or a major new feature for MediaWiki users in general). GSoC has been really hit or miss with our community over the past few years. Whether it's lack of resources, or burnout, or who knows, but the ROI of developer time has been smaller than I think we'd like to see. We've had some great students in the past who've done some stellar work, and we've also had projects that went nowhere and ended up bitrotting somewhere. I think we'd all like to avoid the latter. -Chad _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
