Wow. Thank you Dinu, Sumit and Yaron for the comments.
Let me try commenting inline, without making a mess out of it.
On Thu, Nov 3, 2016 at 3:29 PM, Yaron Koren yaron@wikiworks.com wrote:
I see these as four unrelated issues, and actually I see only two of them as real issues: #2 I don't think is true (though I'm not sure if that's what you meant by "usability"), while #4 I don't see as an issue at all. Personally, I think only projects proposed by potential mentors should be considered at all, and that the documentation should state that clearly. I'm not aware of any GSoC projects where the student came up with the idea on their own and then executed on it successfully - with the exception of projects where the student is an established MediaWiki developer who happens to currently be in college, but that's obviously a special case. It's just not reasonable to expect that someone from outside the WMF/MediaWiki community would be able to come up with a project that (a) makes sense, (b) fits within the current development roadmap, and (c) is of the right scope for a GSoC/Outreachy project.
You are right, and a student proposing a project few days before the GSoC project cannot make (a) sense and (b) fit anywhere. This is exactly why we are trying to solve. With such a program, the student gets in cool with the community a bit (as having a few months headstart), and we might even end up having students who might be able to understand the community to propose something that makes sense ? I know there is whole lot of optimism in there, but there can be chance. Like in my case, my GSoC 14 project on VERP was not a featured project, and strangely one day Nemo Bis talked to me about this while roamin around in #wikimedia-dev. I just think better connections and understanding of the community might even bring in better projects (too much opitmism there).
More generally, I don't think there's anything less rewarding about doing a project that someone else came up with. In software development, as in most things, the difficult part - and the most rewarding part - is the execution, not the original idea. (There are various inspirational quotes to this effect.)
Agreed.
That leaves #1 and #3 - fewer students participating, fewer students staying on afterwards. I think #1 is just a function of fewer potential mentors getting involved. Retaining students, on the other hand, is a real problem. I can think of various ways to try to improve this, though creating a new outreach/funding program seems extreme - it would take a lot of work, and you would presumably run into the same problem of a limited number of mentors. If there's money to pay for these kinds of things, why not just put more money into, say, hiring more developers from out of the GSoC pool? It's one idea.
This was indeed our concern, but considering the way FOSSASIA or KDE runs it, I dont think it might cost us that much (possibly underestimating). We might have a bit of trouble finding out enough projects which are of different levels, but once we find out that, assigning and a lose structure in mentoring might turn out to make things easy for mentors and students. Like we are not supervised by Google or Gnome for the same, and the program can run without hardly too much of regulations, and minimum rewards.
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