Dear Lucas, > > Thirdly, I will create our own outreach initiative. The Outreachy project > > has > > been incredibly successful both in involving new developers > > under-represented > > in free software but also as a marketing coup for the GNOME project.
I wouldn't want to set in stone nor dictate exactly how a program would work without further input and consultation but I see no reason why it could not follow the generally established pattern of matching mentors and candidates with some modest stipend available for the student. This would certainly be an area where delegation would be incredibly useful. Indeed, I've already had private offers of help from both inside and outside the Debian project on this area. > One thing I value in Debian is that, when working on Debian, we can mostly > forget who is the employer of contributors […] It might kill a lot of fun > for me if other contributors were Debian employees. I understand your concern. I, too, would feel a lot of fun disappear from Debian in such a environment. :/ However, I think such fears are overblown; the number of students would never be so great to swamp others' work and the scope of the individual projects would naturally limit any real change in the balance as would the level of renumeration. The mentor/student relationship would also set the tone of interactions with the rest of the project. Futhermore, Debian has had years of experience incorporating GSOC and Outreachy students without it coming close to feeling like a Dunc Tank 2. > I'm also a bit surprised that you qualify Outreachy as a "marketing coup for > the GNOME project". Could you elaborate on that? Surely in OPW times, GNOME > was > prominently mentioned, but they also did a lot of work. You might actually be raising a good point in my favour without realising it :) Outreachy is not even affiliated with the GNOME project anymore. As I understand it, there's no GNOME branding affiliated with it anymore except for the infrastructure, which Conservancy working to move away from… yet the general perception IME is that it's "GNOME Outreachy", showing how being the title/original sponsor is extremely powerful and, perhaps, worth a slight overlap of efforts. Best wishes, -- ,''`. : :' : Chris Lamb `. `'` la...@debian.org / chris-lamb.co.uk `-