this is a nice idea, but at the end of the day, there has to be something credible in the community like google summer of code or the like to attract participation from college students, lets not forget they might be willing to contribute but they wont unless it also helps them build a credible CV, so there has to be a community wide effort to integrate students into the main stream, the mentoring program is a great idea, and can integrate students but if we really want this to pick up we need to have a massive movement and competition among the students themselves to be able to contribute, and the winning contributions can win some sort of certificates or some monetary prize or the like, a competition will bring in better talent and consequently better contributions, this in no way is a replacement for the regular fix a bug and move up the ladder routine but this can occasionally like once a year or so could bring in some good talent and encourage participation.

Regards

Aditya Kumar Sharma

On Wed, Jun 18, 2008 at 2:21 PM, "Sankarshan (সঙ্কর্ষণ)" <foss.mailinglists@gmail.com> wrote:
susmit shannigrahi wrote:

Generally the final/pre-final year engineering students need to do
some project work on a topic.
What I personally saw that they desperately search for one.

we can make a lot of  new contributors if we provide them with a
project to work, some guidence
and may be a certificate at the end. (As they say, target this segment :))

Quite by chance this was the same topic that I broached to Spot yesterday afternoon. And it turns out that a good place to push these potential contributors would be towards doing "Fedora QE" starting up with learning how to triage, process and work the bug queue and additionally coming up with Test Cases.




--

http://www.gutenberg.net - Fine literature digitally re-published
http://www.plos.org - Public Library of Science
http://www.creativecommons.org - Flexible copyright for creative work



--