On 12/05/2016 01:41 PM, Ulrich Stärk wrote:
> On 03.12.16 23:16, Rich Bowen wrote:
>> So, this question was asked several weeks ago, and, so far, we have no
>> statistics. I wonder if, now that there appears to be some interest
>> around GSoC 2017 starting up, someone could look back at their notes and
>> answer some of these questions.
>>
>> While it's cool that folks are spending time on GSoC, for the sake of
>> GSoC, and of the students, it would also be awesome to know whether the
>> time and money that the ASF puts into this is actually doing something
>> towards the stated goal of Community Development.
>>
>> Or, at the very least, can we make a commitment to track this data going
>> forward?
> 
> Let me play the devil's advocate here: What for?
> 
> GSoC is completely free for the ASF (on the contrary, we even get a small 
> amount for every accepted
> student that we can than put towards fulfilling our goals) and as long as we 
> have volunteers willing
> to organize it and mentor students we can assume that at least those 
> volunteers are seeing value in
> it. Why the stats other than for satisfying our curiosity?

Let's flip that around: If the ASF doesn't benefit in any way from this,
why are we bothering with it? why is it the prominent (and in many cases
the _only_) thing in our board reports?

Going back a few reports (those that are public at this date), they all
seem to be either about starting, doing or concluding (which we have no
data on) GSoC and then perhaps a small bit of extra data on all the
rest. It is a VERY prominent thing, so why is that so?

The task of ComDev is developing community. If we don't have any data or
interest in acquiring such to show that this is in fact helping towards
that, then we should consider whether the current strategy is the right
thing to focus on.

But this goes beyond GSoC in my mind. We should be looking at ALL ComDev
projects and evaluate what we want to keep, what isn't working, and what
needs a do-over. The task of ComDev is to *develop communities*, it
shouldn't just be a dumping ground for all things cross-project, whether
they work or not. That is at least my opinion.

We try strategies, give them life, see if they work, and if not, we put
them to sleep or fix them.

With regards,
Daniel.

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Uli
> 
>>
>> --Rich
>>
>> On 11/16/2016 05:18 AM, Nick Burch wrote:
>>> On Wed, 16 Nov 2016, Rich Bowen wrote:
>>>> It would be great to have some kind of statistics on how GSoC helps
>>>> projects longer term. Do students stick around? Does the code written
>>>> actually get incorporated into releases? Does it in fact contribute to
>>>> the mission of Community Development, or is it just a nice summer job
>>>> for these students?
>>>
>>> Do we have a list (maybe somewhere in the comdev private svn?) of
>>> everyone who has taken part in GSoC?
>>>
>>> If so, it'd be fairly easy to annotate that with apache IDs, then see
>>> who's now on PMCs or who's now a member. Producing sharable statistics
>>> from that automatically is then easy. (I say this as someone who helped
>>> update the similar Travel Assistance Committee / TAC ones on Monday!)
>>>
>>> Not sure if it's easy to find out the "last commit date" for people, to
>>> check for the "still around" part (eg for people who got committership
>>> during GSoc, maybe on a branch), but I know where infra are to ask...
>>>
>>> Nick
>>>
>>> PS FWIW, within Tika we've certainly had a few GSoC people stick around!
>>>
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>>
>>
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