[Soc-coordination] Gathering projects

[Ana Guerrero]

On Fri, Feb 04, 2011 at 04:42:55PM +0100, Obey Arthur Liu wrote:
> - How to improve the way we gather an ideas list? We're having some trouble
> coming up with a good list each year.



In the past, there has been a wiki page gathering all the projects 
proposals and people was free to add stuff. Projects were proposed 
in 3 different ways:

a) Debian contributor is interested in mentoring a student to do a
certain project.

b) Debian contributor would like to get something done but he
is not interested in mentoring it or he does not have the skills/time.

c) Student is interested in doing something in Debian. It happens
sometimes but it is not very usual.


I think we all can agree any project proposal must have a skilled
(or very interested) mentor, with a) being the 'ideal' case.
However there is a small problem with a), sometimes potential mentors
have unrealistic ideas about what can be achieved during the GSOC, what
students should do or how a project should work. Also I am sure some
people did not propose stuff because they thought it was not a good
gsoc project when most of the proposals can become good project 
candidates after some work on them.

In the case b), before the project is being offered to students, we
should get an available mentor. Same goes with case c) after filtering
what the student wants to go makes sense for Debian.


So for this year, I propose we should continue using the wiki page approach
*but* only adding projects after we have seen they are doable as a GSOC
project and they have a mentor. For this we would encourage people who
want to propose a project to send an email to this list and discuss it
here if they fulfill both conditions. Then add them to the page following
the same template we had in the past:

Name:
Mentor(s)
Desirable skills: (or what student will need to learn)
Description:
Deliverable:


Once we have an agreement about how to collect projects, we add some links
about what being a mentor entails and we can start spamming all Debian 
communication channels looking for mentors and proposals. Hopefully soon :D

Ana