(leaving in lots of quoting as original didn't make it to foundation-l)

Evan Prodromou wrote:

On Fri, 2006-14-04 at 14:01 -0700, Brion Vibber wrote:

...

Google's doing their Summer of Code program again this year. We missed last years', but I'm going to try signing us up as a mentoring organization this year.

Great! I think SoC is good for MediaWiki for a couple of reasons. First, hey, free code. Second, I think getting the intern process straight for the SoC would make it easier if the Wikimedia Foundation ever wants to stimulate development by giving the same kind of grant packages. (The idea's been floated before, I don't know what the status is right now, just thought I'd point out that SoC might be good practice.)

Yep! The fact that a lot of the basic administrative work will be done by someone else is obviously convenient for a first time...

...

Feel free to put any relevant-sounding project ideas here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2006

I've added the list of future directions that Wikia, Wikitravel, and Wikimedia developed in LA last month. I think there are a lot of hot, juicy projects on there that a smart student might want to take a swipe at.

I want to quickly run through the requirements, from http://code.google.com/soc/mentorfaq.html#2 :

 1. A pool of project ideas for students to choose from. Check. Link
    is above.
 2. Someone available to review student "blue-sky" proposals.
    Uncheck. I'll volunteer here if needed.
 3. Someone available to decide which applications should be
    accepted. This is more of a lead developer job, albeit with
    input from the community and other developers, so I think it'd
    have to be brion or Tim.
 4. A person (or people) to monitor the progress of the students.
    Unknown. Again, I would be happy to give some time to this, and
    I think there are probably other members of the team who would
    do it, too.
 5. A mentor ready to take over for the assigned mentor(s) .
    Unknown. I can volunteer to be a mentor, but I can't volunteer
    to back myself up.
 6. A written evaluation of each student developer. I can do that.

I've held myself out as our "organization administrator" for SoC; we can divide the rest of the labor as necessary. :)

Once they get us in the system we should be able to set up the individual 'mentor's.

...

So I think it will be important to try to engage the folks working on our projects if we want to keep them. :)

I'd strongly suggest that any new development be made as an extension. That will keep it from being problematic for our mainstream codebase.

Where possible I totally agree.

Brion: will you be sending the application to Google?

Already have, they sounded very positive. Should work its way through the system soon...

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)