On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 3:07 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Furthermore, considering GSoC solely in terms of benefit to Mediawiki/Wikipedia is short-sighted. Take a look at the organizations participating: http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/projects/list/google/gsoc2012 . What would your opinion be if WMF were not on that list?
Personally, I don't care very much about being a participant for the sake of being a participant (and I imagine many others feel similarly). I think for a lot of people who watch these Summer of Code projects, it _is_ about benefit to MediaWiki/Wikimedia, particularly as getting involved in these projects can detract from already painfully finite mentoring and reviewing resources.
I think you touch the most important point here. I'm one of the main people who manage GSoC for KDE. KDE is the biggest org taking part in GSoC this year in terms of number of students mentored. In addition we are running our own program (Season of KDE) next to it. So in total I'd say we've mentored about 100 students through these programs this year alone. We didn't get there by accident. You know what the main benefit of GSoC is in my opinion? Getting an organisation into the mindset of mentoring - into the mindset of "yes we need to train new people because they can do awesome things even if they screw up sometimes on the way there".
Cheers Lydia