Thank you Brian, Nischay, John, Cyken and Yaron for the words. You people are doing a great job by keeping this thread and idea alive. I would want to agree to disagree at places like - 'hiring everyone of them' or things like that. If we are talking about making people stick, the model I am talking about would be a *cheaper *option ?
I just want to reply to something over here.
On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 4:43 AM, Nischay Nahata nischayn22@gmail.com wrote:
I think GSoC or Wikimedia and schools/colleges don't reach out to each other in a proper manner. This leads to late and limited discovery of GSoC (only some students will know mostly when they stalk their seniors profile). So I think there has to be an effort to reach out to students early on, let them know about this programme, etc. This can be done by approaching through the current/past students and maybe the faculty.
We are talking about the participation for an international event, and I dont think reaching out to every University and department would scale. Like, what can we talk - even if we have this hypothetical awareness camp to all profs and students ? It would be something like - If you want to contribute to Mediawiki, please do, and we have this shiny thing called GSoC, which can give you something cool on your resume etc. Better than this, if we have in event in hand, this thing can go really well - specially I am talking about the wide reach of it. People can just share links, sign up and participate.
I really liked what John is doing in Indonesia - that program, when planned at the right time before GSoC or GCI, can have a huge boost to the number of applications and more than that, the quality of the applications. The number of spam proposals which we recieve each year, might even reduce.
Thinking practical, if with little support, I feel that this program might be able to be a huge hit, specially in my home country - India, and if there is enough support, I might be able to even run a sample of it over there and see how the results change. I would need little help like, maybe few goodies for people who can show exceptional peformance and something for the grand prize.
Thanks, Tony Thomas https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:01tonythomas Home http://www.thomastony.me | Blog https://tttwrites.wordpress.com/ | ThinkFOSS http://www.thinkfoss.com