On Fri, Mar 12, 2010 at 2:55 PM, K. Peachey p858snake@yahoo.com.au wrote:
The reason I suggested a separate IRC channel, since i wrote about it at night and my crazied ramblings probably didn't resemble much, (or communication venue in general, for example people have pointed out a mailing list) is because as someone pointed out (someone, Dmitriy i think it was without rereading all the emails) pointed out some of our channels are quite busy such as our #mediawiki and it is easy for questions to be missed espically in the peak-er hours of IRCing.
I've certainly experienced this problem myself, so I can definitely understand it. However, this is something that all new contributors are in danger of going through, not just the paid interns, so we should probably think a little bit about the larger problem while we're at it.
That's not to say that we shouldn't come up with a GSoC-specific solution as well. I'm not sure a new channel is the right solution, but it's worth brainstorming on solutions. For example, is there a helpful (and non-annoying) role that a bot might be able to play? E.g. a bot can know the IRC handles of the students, and if no one answers that person by name after 30 minutes, it could ping a set of us volunteers with "xxx, yyy, zzz, robla: could you check if GSoC-Student-A's question: 'is it ok if I introduce a couple new globals?' got answered?" I'd be ok with being on that list.
Rob