[Soc-coordination] project proposal: contributors portal

[Gergely Nagy]

Stefano Zacchiroli <zack at debian.org> writes:

> On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 01:57:37PM +0100, Gergely Nagy wrote:
>> Stefano Zacchiroli <zack at debian.org> writes:
>> 
>> > Requirement: familiarity with www.d.o infrastructure and with web
>> >   development in general
>> 
>> Could the bar be lowered here? I doubt there are many people out there
>> with www.d.o infrastructure knowledge. But there are possibly a lot
>> more, who'd be able to get familiar with it reasonably quickly,
>> f.e. during the getting to know each other phase of GSoC.
>> 
>> And then we could add that "The student will become familiar with the
>> www.d.o infrastructure, <some good words about www.d.o; why being
>> familiar with it is good, etc.. sadly I'm not>" - which could look much
>> more appealing, no?
>
> I'll leave this to Frances to pick it up.
>
> But in general, I'm a big fan of the principle of "as part of your
> application, please provide us a patch doing $trivial_thing". It is
> part of the clang proposal by Sylvestre, and we have both shamelessly
> stolen the idea from what VLC people are doing.
>
> So, answering to yours, we might lower the bar. But if it is expected
> that it is easy to get that knowledge, then IMHO we should also ask for
> a trivial patch as part of the application and expect that students will
> get the needed knowledge *before* applying.

I wholeheartedly agree with that. Perhaps my phrasing wasn't the best,
but what you just described above is great, I just think that obtaining
the familiarity could be listed elsewhere than a strict requirement, and
instead, a patch or something similar should be asked from the student
as part of the application.

That reads better, and accomplishes something very similar, indeed.

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