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On Wed, Apr 10, 2013 at 12:41 PM, Grant Ingersoll <gsing...@apache.org> wrote: > > > On Apr 10, 2013, at 10:26 AM, Ulrich Stärk wrote: > >> Folks, >> >> I perceive a low interest of our projects in GSoC. The list of projects that >> submitted project ideas >> that I compiled for Sally contained 33 entries of which some are subprojects >> I believe. With 138 >> PMCs plus 35 podlings, this is less than one fifth of our projects. >> >> We only had 34 ideas one week before our application was due. >> > > For my two cents, GSOC has been a mixed result for me personally. I think > I've mentored 4 times in the past. Two were successful, two were not (one > time, the student simply went radio silent about 1/2 way through despite > producing code all the way up to that point). I know others in Mahout had > similar experiences where it was a mixed bag. For me, this year (and last), > it simply was a matter of not having the time to commit to it, esp. in light > of the fact that I couldn't reliably predict whether it would be successful > or not, despite putting in a fair amount of due diligence up front, in fact > more than I would even do for someone I was directly hiring. > > >> I run into committers that are not members of their projects PMCs who are >> eager to be mentors but >> have no clue about what's going on because nobody from the PMC forwarded my >> emails to their dev lists. >> >> So the problem seems twofold: no interest and not reaching the right people. >> The latter could be >> improved by simply sending to committers@ instead of pmcs@ but it's the >> first that worries me. > > committers@ does seem like it would be better from an awareness POV. > >> >> I believe GSoC and every other opportunity to attract new contributors to >> our projects should be a >> key priority of our PMCs. Apparently it's not, for whatever reasons. I could >> think of missing >> cycles, indifference, and wrong priorities. > > Perhaps, esp. for more popular projects, there is no shortage of > contributors? I really don't know. Overall, I like GSOC and may do it again > in the future, but it was too much time currently. > > >> >> So what could we do to increase awareness for the opportunities GSoC offers >> and that this program is >> important to the foundation? Write more emails? Ask the board to mandate a >> section in board reports >> detailing the project's GSoC endeavors? Any ideas? >> > > I don't think mandating makes sense. We're all volunteers and if a PMC > doesn't want to do GSOC then that is their choice. > > >> Uli > >
