Hello hive, Greetings! It’s been amazing reading everyone's responses so far to this thread! Thank you, Tony, for starting this discussion! :) I think the goals that you are pointing to are important. Although, I haven’t been part of the Wikimedia’s participation in GSOC in the past, as an ex-GSOCer I am quite familiar with the program. Sharing a few concerns/ additional thoughts below: - I think that the beauty of the GSOC program is that it gives students the autonomy (unlike any other academic/ non-academic program in developing nations) to choose projects they are interested in working on, and that are a good fit with their skill set. It is a unique program that I think exposes students to a lot of the areas all at once: communication, software development, research, documentation, etc. I feel that GSOC and similar outreach programs, have played a vital role in students lives and to some extent helped them in taking decisions about their next career steps. At this year’s LinuxCon Karen Sandler tweeted: *“so fun seeing how many women at #LinuxCon got their start with @outreachy!” * that are run before GSOC to reach out to diverse audiences and spread more awareness. But I am not sure how I feel about running competitive programs and training and reaching out to students through the faculties in the universities. I am worried that GSOC would become another milestone that students are expected to serve as part of their academic curriculum in the years to come. It would be great if we keep the participation in this program a personal choice, and as interest-driven as possible :) - A lot of former GSOCers run an outreach session ahead of the program in their universities or their circles. Most of the times, the message which by mistake gets delivered, set false expectations, motivations, and hopes among prospective students. For example: "If you participate, you will get money, will get to travel to conferences, or you might end up working for the organization." It's a bit of a cultural issue. Still, we do not want students to be joining us for the program with any false motivation. I wonder if we could run a cultural orientation for our incoming students to make them understand our community better, encourage the spirit of learning more than anything else and help set the expectations right. :) So that when they begin to do outreach after they finish, they are acutely aware of the dos and the donts. - I am sure we have some amazing mentors, who put a lot of effort all throughout the program right from framing the GSOC project to mentoring students. I understand that allowing beginners to propose an idea does not make sense. But still, I wonder if while preparing a project idea, we as mentors ask ourselves: "how would a project proposal look like such that besides benefiting our community, would be interesting enough to keep a student engaged and motivated all throughout?", "Will the student involved in the project get something out of it?", and "What deliverables could make a project deployable at the end so that it's a satisfying experience for both the parties?". - Codeheat is an interesting initiative, but I think running something which requires almost the same level of efforts as GSOC would be hard to coordinate. *Here is a summary and a few action steps that we could consider:* - Conduct cultural orientation for incoming GSOCers so that they understand our communities and the values we share. So that when they begin to the outreach after they finish, they convey the message right. - Encourage awareness about our community/ projects among students much ahead of GSOC so that students have enough understanding of the project, have already contributed in advance of the contest, and this way we could get better quality proposals. - Encourage weekly check-ins, or updates through IRC/ online gatherings where students could get an opportunity to share their GSOC work with each other verbally. - Invite recent GSOC students to be mentors for the GCI/ Outreachy. Some of which we have been already doing and did very recently this year for GCI <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T148952>. - Mentors frame proposals which are interesting enough to keep our students motivated, ensure a student's work get deployed to the production. And, our mentors ask: "What would a student get out of this? What will they learn?". - Lastly, we let the program more interest-driven, rather than making any piece of it mandatory :) Questions, feedback, most welcomed! :) Cheers, Srishti -- Srishti Sethi Developer Advocate Technical Collaboration team https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:SSethi_(WMF) On Mon, Nov 7, 2016 at 9:08 PM, Yaron Koren &lt;yaron(a)wikiworks.com&gt; wrote: