How to help those who don't make it

[Dhushyanth R]

Hi all,
Fedora-Summer-Coding will be an excellent opportunity for students to
spend their summer in a fruitful way. The $Funding$ apart, since many
of the students in their first year or second year here _don't_ have
to do intern for course credit, it will be an excellent opportunity to
rope them into the community.

In this regard, I expect many of the relatively "inexperienced"
students may get rejected.
So can there be a mechanism where we say "Ok. Your proposal didn't get
selected(maybe because of lack of clarity of idea, availability of a
better proposal for the same idea, etc), but you still get to work on
it- or this other alternative" say ask him to package stuff, patch
some non-trivial bugs,etc ; albeit for a T-Shirt or Certificate or
$CheapAlternative.


 This "code for cotton/certificate" will ensure that students who are
not selected don't feel that they have to be a genius to get selected,
and that they can help in their own way. Otherwise on the face of
rejection students may often shrink back further in their shell and
fail to open up to the community. Basically we "bait" them with SOC
and if by chance they fall through we route them through our normal
"Join" process. The difference being this time "Join"ing will be
closely monitored, planned and will be coding oriented.

The load on mentors will be the deciding factor whether this can
actually be implemented. Maybe we can ask the "normal" fedora mentors
to help?



Regards
dash123