[Sugar-devel] Fwd: Google Summer of Code 2009 is a go!

[Marco Pesenti Gritti]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 12:04 AM, Mel Chua <mel at melchua.com> wrote:
> I am puzzled, though; are these two things mutually exclusive? In any
> case, students will be proposing their own projects, as is usual with
> GSoC; what we're talking about is kickstarting their proposal thinking
> by listing known projects of the *type* they could take on (thought they
> may think the listed projects are the most rewarding they could do,
> that's fine as well), that SL developers themselves find interesting and
> important. Understanding what's hard and what's important to a community
> makes it far easier to join and participate in it, at least in my
> experience.

Few comments from a developer point of view:

* Working on the core has surely an higher entry barrier, but I think
we can lower it a lot by spending time with the students and guiding
them through the process. I worked in the past with students which had
basically no previous experience with Sugar and with most of the
technologies it uses, and it worked out just fine. The difficulties
are mostly about setting up the environment and about understanding
what's the best way to solve the problems, and both can be addressed
with good mentoring.

* Having students work on projects which are success critical (but
currently not taken by anyone) will be an incentive for mentors to
spend more time and energies doing their work. As long as I get
something which is critically useful to the project, I'm totally
willing to spend a lot of time facilitating it.

* Looking even beyond soc, imo the best projects to propose to
contributors are those which are very relevant, reasonably well known
and not blocking/taken. In mature projects those are very rare, but we
have abundance of them in Sugar, they just need to be articulated.

* If I try to think to the most successful soc projects we had in the
last year, a bunch of them, perhaps most, have been hacking on "core".

Marco