On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 10:31 AM, Chad <[email protected]> wrote:
> 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. > Absolutely! I think it's going to be exceptionally important to encourage students to be active on IRC and generally visible in the community. 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. I put together a page of past projects here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_Past_Projects <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_Past_Projects>Could people that know what the true latest status of all of these projects go in and fill out what they know? That will help us figure out what the characteristics of a project that's likely to be successful will be. I suspect that projects that involve integrating large blobs of non-PHP code into MediaWiki are the most troublesome. They sound cool on the surface, but probably end up being a little bit like strapping a jetpack onto a cat ("what could possibly go wrong?"). Self-contained extensions without outside dependencies seem the most likely to have long-term benefits, as well as very carefully scoped tweaks to the core (e.g. improvements to lesser used special pages). Rob _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
