I think GSOC is very valuable, both for the students and the ASF projects that participate.
Even if a student does not hang around after GSOC (were they made committer?) it is still good for communities to get fresh drive and ideas, and ask questions which established committers might not have thought that newbies didn't know. GSOC projects are good ways to kick-start new prototypes and challenge the existing architecture. In a way GSOC also teaches/reminds projects how to make its code, documentation and community welcoming for newcomers, so that is why I think it is particularly good to encourage fresh incubator podlings to participate. This can't be easily measured in numbers. GSOC mentoring can draw significant project bandwidth, yes, but then projects and potential mentors can choose to participate or not per year. On 5 Dec 2016 2:46 pm, "Shane Curcuru" <a...@shanecurcuru.org> wrote: > Ulrich Stärk wrote on 12/5/16 9:27 AM: > > On 05.12.16 14:30, Daniel Gruno wrote: > >> On 12/05/2016 01:41 PM, Ulrich Stärk wrote: > ...snip... > >> 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. > > > > Geez, we are not maximizing for efficiency here (and that coming from a > management consultant, how > > ironic). > > > > Let me take GSoC as an example again. As long as we have volunteer > mentors from our communities that > > want to mentor students working on their projects than we IMO don't need > any additional metric or a > > certain level of usefulness to justify running the program. Our > communities think it is important - > > otherwise they wouldn't invest the time -, so should we. > ...snip... > > You both have excellent points. > > I believe GSoC is a very valuable program for the ASF and the projects > that participate, and I really hope the volunteers stepping up to > organize keep doing it. I'll try to remember to thank you more often! > > Separately, it's great when we can also improve things, or at least show > some sort of progress towards helping our project's communities grow. > Given the rest of the organization that GSoC brings, and the fact that > our LDAP and other records are getting pretty easy to script against, it > would be great if some volunteer wanted to track people who became > committers from GSoC to see their contributions in the future. > > But just because no-one has stepped up to do the metrics doesn't mean we > should stop GSoC. If people want to volunteer to do something that's > generally positive, great. Suggestions for improvements are good; > getting in the way to slow progress because some additional goal hasn't > yet attracted a volunteer to do it is not as good. > > - Shane > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@community.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@community.apache.org > >
