Of course being mentor for the past 2 years I want to be a mentor again this year. But there are a few things we need to fix. I sent an email to the other mentors about 3 months ago about things that went "not-so-well" last year.
Here are a few things that were suggested and came out of this "discussion" that we should do in order to improve this year's GSoC. 1. Students to send weekly or bi-weekly emails to public lists to inform of progress and ask for help if needed (After all it's open source not only the mentor can help :P) - we should make sure we strictly follow this rule as last year it was somewhat forgotton. 2. Having a blog where each student has to post about (This could maybe be used instead of the weekly mailing list email?) 3. A public repository for all the projects within PHP GSoC. Easily findable and browsable. 4. If a private list incurs then a CC to the public development mailing should be done. 5. 2 mentors per project (this was mentioned above) EOF; Basically what has to be remembered from last year is that even though some projects did very well and our organizational activities got better than the year before, we still lacked communication within the PHP GSoC projects in general. For instance I left on honeymoon for a tad longer than expected and no one knew what was happening with my student, it was hosted on another CVS server and only one person from that other server was available but without me telling the admins of the project, it was quite complex for them to retrieve and get CVS access to which repository. Luckily enough Derick was the admin of the other CVS repo so he got us fixed but the problem still remained that with the lack of communication, my student, the admins and me were all in the dark about the student's progress. After the midterms started a weekly email, with a lot more communication and the project developed a whole lot faster, the student obviously gained confidence and commited a whole lot more to the project. I'm know some other mentors have some other stories they could share but what I'm trying to outline here is that communication is the key, and the more people ready and able to help can make the project go much faster, make the student feel much more in control and make a solid final product. Should we start a "regulations and procedures to follow" page on the wiki and simply go from there? -- Slan, David -- PHP Internals - PHP Runtime Development Mailing List To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
