On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 08:43:29AM -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
Most of the GSoC projects we get proposals for are ideas which were suggested by mentors/members of the GNOME projects on https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreach/SummerOfCode/2014/Ideas Students are also encouraged to come up with their own project ideas, but in this case we insist that this must be discussed with the project maintainers first to make sure that this is something that is useful to the project. Then there are indeed some (a few!) more experimental projects that we pick because the student seems good, and this could have an interesting outcome, but we don't pick a lot of such projects each year.Yes, but I don't think that process is sufficient. Some of the projects that get accepted seem to be of significantly higher value to GNOME than others. Others are important, but not really enough to merit the entire stipend.
So it's better to only have 15 students working on important things, rather than having these 15 students, plus 10 others working on less important things?
I think we got a good set of students, but I'd rather select a promising student while rejecting the student's project proposal if the proposal is only tangential to our interests.You seem to imply we should reorient good students on more important projects if what they propose does not seem very useful?Yes! Within reason; we don't want to push students to work on projects they're not interested in, but we also don't want to fund them to work on something that's largely tangential to our interests.
Why not? If it's the preferred student project, if the maintainers of the associated module is ok with the project, isn't it good to have students learn about our platform in general (gtk+, ...) even though they are not working on a core GNOME module? We try to find some kind of balance between the various projects, we sometimes try to push students to work on core projects rather than the alternatives, but sometimes students are just not interested, or the core projects maintainers/contributors cannot mentor any/more students. Christophe
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