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.
Feel free to put any relevant-sounding project ideas here: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2006
Mozilla's experience last year wasn't so good[1]; some of their projects didn't complete, and most of them haven't been touched since the end of the summer.
Doh. I guess I fall into Mozilla's "not so good" category, then, since my localization project from last summer's SoC hasn't seen much (public) activity since last fall. [1] By way of lame excuses, school has taken about 80% of my time, sleep has taken another 10%, and work on Wikipedia has greedily eaten up all the rest. :) It seems that I can't go a day without getting an urgent message asking for help on a Wikipedia article -- and of course I can't say no to that (c.f. "wikipediholic").
As my project website says, I still hope to get something out the door by the end of May; hopefully I won't have too much more schoolwork in the meantime. That's why Google chose to do this in the summer, I guess. I've found some software that should make the translation process more efficient, since I had been translating by hand in Notepad.
I think Wikimedia's participants would be more likely than Mozdev to produce active projects, since the Wikimedia community seems to have a lot more attention directed at things like localization and customization [2] than Mozdev did.
[1] http://vi.mozdev.org/ [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchanges?namespace=8 for example
Mono however had a much more positive experience[2], with most of their projects completing and being further developed and adopted after the end.
So I think it will be important to try to engage the folks working on our projects if we want to keep them. :)
[1] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2006/03/summer_of_code_six_mont...
[2] http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2006/Apr-13.html
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)