[Soc-coordination] Status of the Taverna/BOINC/Wrapper/GeneticCloning projects

[Obey Arthur Liu]

On Wed, Apr 6, 2011 at 8:17 PM, Charles Plessy <plessy at debian.org> wrote:

> Le Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 05:06:50PM -0400, Obey Arthur Liu a écrit :
> >
> > Similar projects submitted by students the previous years have been
> > immediately notified of the various issues suggested above and forwarded
> to
> > more relevant organizations.
>
> Hello Arthur,
>

Hello Charles,


>
> This does not correspond to my experience for the years 2008 and 2009.  I
> do
> not remember that projects that got the interest of a mentor in Debian were
> discarded before the slot assignment for the sole reason of being less
> related
> to core processes of Debian than other projects.
>

This is one but not the sole reason. Realize also that these projects are
much more off-topic than what we encountered the previous years from
mentors. It also seems that they would be much harder to rewrite into
on-topic proposals.
It has happened during previous years that DD-proposed subjects would be
rejected early on, for various reasons.


>
> About vagueness of the proposals, I think that it is indeed an important
> point
> on which to filter, but during the ranking phase, where what is evaluated
> is
> the student's project, not the seed idea on the Debian side.
>
> I think that we should let good projects compete as long as they are
> supported
> by a Debian mentor.  Why rejecting contriubutions ?  Are you worried to
> have so
> many slots that you are already considering to return some empty ones that
> could only be filled by projects related to science ?  Unless you had more
> than
> a hundred of students applying,  the trend is rather to have the same
> number or
> less slots, isn't it ?  And the applications to projects related to science
> contribute to the number of slots that Debian gets.
>

This slot issue might happen. We also have management limits of our own.
Figuring out how a Debian core project goes is one thing. Figuring out how a
genetic research problem is going is whole another thing. We'd have trouble
following one, let alone 4-5.


>
> If the slot attribution is done the same as in 2008 and 2009, it will just
> take
> the mentors participating to the ranking to ignore anything with “science”
> in,
> to get these projects kicked out unless the student proposals on more core
> tasks are weak.  I think that it would be a good compromise.
>
> Contrary to the usual off-topic proposals that we usually get, these
student proposals are actually decent.
We would be doing a very selfish disservice to the students to let them
apply with normal expectations of being selected.
I didn't mention this strong enough in my first mail, but my suggestion to
these students is to contact one of the many science related organizations
participating in the Summer of Code, where I believe they would have very
decent chances of being selected, for the same or another project.

Regards,
-Arthur
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