Hi,

bawolff wrote:

I actually disagree somewhat - I think it can be very rewarding to fix

a problem that you yourself have, as opposed to fixing somebody else's problem. This is a traditional ideology about open source - that it is all about scratching your own itch.

Although arguably most gsoc students coming up with their own projects aren't actually scratching their own itch but desperately trying to come up with an idea. However, if someone happens to be a preexisting user of MediaWiki, and finds something they find super annoying, I think that can make for a very good project.

In theory this is true. In practice, I'm not sure if there has ever been a successful WMF GSoC project where the idea was the student's own - other than in cases where the student was already part of the MediaWiki community. Which makes sense: if a student's only experience with MediaWiki is, say, reading and writing wiki articles, then chances are good that whatever they find annoying is something that many other people also find annoying, and thus would have been fixed already if it were easy to fix.

bawolff also wrote:

As for users sticking around - I think the communication around gsoc

has shifted from "Here's some money so you can work on MediaWiki without starving to death" to "Here's a little money and a job so you can put something cool on your resume". If students are being attracted to the program principally to have something on their resume or for the money (To be clear, I'm not saying there is anything wrong with that), its not surprising that they leave afterwards when the money goes away. If we want to attract people in the long term, we should probably come up with a better carrot.

Yes, this is absolutely the issue. I don't know if there's a lower "conversion" percentage now than there used to be, but certainly to convince people to do free labor for you, especially if their first experience with you involved payment, seems difficult. That's assuming that free labor is the ultimate goal, as opposed to, say, finding more people for the WMF to hire. More on that below.

Tony Thomas wrote:

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 assume that's a reference to what I wrote, although I certainly didn't say to hire everyone - I said "students who had useful projects". I don't know which option would be cheaper - hiring some of the students or setting up a new mentorship program - but the main question is really what the goal is. Is it to get more free labor over the long term? If so, I don't know if either option is that effective. Personally, I think it's great if such projects result in actually useful software, and it's a shame if that software goes uncompleted or abandoned at the end of the program.

-Yaron