press release for GSoC participation

[Karsten Wade]

Yesterday we turned in our mentoring organization application[1] for
the 2010 Google Summer of Code[2].  We won't know until next week if
our umbrella organization is accepted, but we'd like to get ahead on
preparing a press release.  This idea came from a side discussion with
Kara, Mel, Paul, and myself.

The idea is to have a press release to out via the Red Hat press blog
(http://press.redhat.com), and have it be usable by Fedora and
JBoss.org.

Below is the background, and here are some relevant pages.

This is our plan:  

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GSoC_2010_plan

This is the in-progress page with information for students, mentors,
sub-projects, upstreams, and admins:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GSoC_2010

Fedora Project and JBoss.org have submitted together as a single
umbrella organization, which was Google's preference in the past.
We've worked up some new ideas and plans to fix problems from the
past, and our goal is to increase both the quantity and quality of
student projects.

Bottom line is this: more quality proposals means more that we like
and rank, which increases the quantity of student slots from Google.
The better we can simplify and amplify our message, the more of that
goodness we'll all get to enjoy.

== Background ==

I'm working on this because last fall I wrote up a report[3] that
revealed some surprising and pleasing results.  After that, our
team[4] agreed it was worth a portion of my time ongoing if we could
accomplish several goals: improve 2010 GSoC as a proving ground; help
push out the framework/methods to other projects (such as what RIT is
doing with our assistance); take lessons and apply them to a larger
idea of improving mentoring and our ability to take in new
contributors in a similar way to students.

For the last few GSoC years Fedora Project has been paired with
JBoss.org under a single "Red Hat umbrella"; this was Google's choice,
and reasonable from the perspective of their watching the program's
size and budget.  Our experience was mixed for two main reasons: no
previous communication channels between Fedora and JBoss that didn't
go through Red Hat; different community types and styles.  JBoss.org
is more like the Apache project - a series of upstreams, loosely or
tightly coupled, that all sit on top of a large number of OSes.

For this year, the already collected mentors began last fall in
working out differences and laying plans for resolving previous
problems.  One example is that we are having mentors and associated
sub-projects compete directly for student slots based on the strength
of the student proposal.  I.e., there is no direct attempt to divide
the slots, some to Fedora, some to JBoss, to create an artificial
fairness.

A few of our mentors, Toshio Kuratomi and Yaakov Neemoy, attended the
Mentor Summit last fall, and brought back ideas and specific plans
from other umbrella organizations that have had greater success than
ours has.  For example, KDE has managed around 40 student projects for
the last few years, compared to our average of 10.

All of that has brought us to this point, where we need to broadly
explain to various target audiences the value of working with our
umbrella organization.

- Karsten

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_Architecture
[2] http://socghop.appspot.com/
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GSoC_report_2009
[4] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Community_Architecture
-- 
name:  Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener
team:                Red Hat Community Architecture 
uri:               http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki
gpg:                                       AD0E0C41
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/attachments/20100312/8608cb00/attachment.bin