Summer of Code 2007 Debrief

How we did it

• Board requested Vincent to organize SoC
  • Everyone was busy, Vincent was assigned to make a call for fresh-new SoC admins
• Two kickoff meetings
  • Meeting 1 (February 28)

    • Minutes

    • Lucas, Christian and Raphael volunteered as SoC admins
  • Meeting 2 (March 7)

    • Minutes

    • Infrastructure was discussed: separate repo? same repo with account to students?
    • Selection Committee idea officialy decided
• February 22: SoC 2007 wiki page created
• March 9: pool of ideas was announced and started
• March 12: Behdad subscribed GNOME as SoC organization
• March 19: call for members in Selection Committee (discussion among admins + list of invitations + mails sent)
• March 14: triaging of the ideas (Rock Stars, Alternatives, Underground)
• March 26: student application deadline

• April 28: first welcome message to students (Read)

• May 2: students progress reports were requested to be delivered each monday (notifications were sent to lagged students) (Read)

• August 21: mentors were reminded about mid-term survey (Read)

• Mid-term survey was completed during GUADEC

• August 21: final reports were requested from students (Read)

• August 21: mentors were reminded about final survey (Read)

The good

• Weekly report and having Lucas to ping missing ones
• A selection committee for choosing the projects
• Comments from community about the submitted applications (Google accounts can be a barrier though)
• Applications were better written and there was a better involvement from each student to clarify and improve their applications and to better define their goals to be achieved at the end of SoC
• Sponsorship for students to attend GUADEC
• GTK+ books for two students during GUADEC
• Welcome messages to students and mentors

The bad

• We weren't strict about missing or late reports.and that beat us at the end for one student+mentor
• There was one case of an unknown/untrusted mentor (hard to contact and get feedback about student's progress)
• We should encourage more mailing list posts to create an atmosphere of liveness during SoC
• Require/suggest student-mentor communication on the relevant upstream project mailing list
• Pool of ideas started too late. We didn't have enough quality ideas when student applications started
• We were not reactive enough to applications: we should have commented earlier, saying "we want more details" (although we did better this year than last year)
• We need more/better communication and summarizing at the end of the program
• Certain things were done at the last minute (for instance, the mid-term and final surveys)

Suggestions

• Many mentoring organizations ask applicants (or students during the bonding period) to provide a bug fix to show that they can find they way in the code.
• Standard for applications with defined goals, deliverables, etc.
• Define a quota for new ideas (not listed in the pool).
• SoC as a yearlong project with the list of ideas being created from January. SoC doesn't need to be a Google SoC-only thing.
• We should go over and send the students either "Congrats on finishing, now hang around #gnome-hackers" or "We're sorry... hang around #gnome-hackers".