Google Summer of Code [was: Thoughts on spin tools] - music - Fedora mailing-lists

20 Mar 2012


      On 03/20/2012 12:49 AM, Karsten 'quaid' Wade wrote:
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I do think we should carry this back to the fedora-music-list - ideally
it gets more attention because we need to spread the word, fast. If you
agree, you can reply back to the list.
On 03/18/2012 01:04 AM, Fernando Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
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On 03/17/2012 01:56 PM, Brendan Jones wrote:
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as you've probably noticed I followed up on Karsten's suggestion
to register the Audio Spin as a GSoC project. Fedora has been
accepted so we've got roughly a week and a half or so to refine
our idea(s) and promote it to students.
We should definitely look in to doing more than one project idea, if
needed.
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As Karsten suggested this could be a good opportunity for
students at Stanford looking to expand their interest in audio
(and perhaps an opportunity for you to recruit likewise
interested people in helping out with the PlanetCCRMA project?)
What's the best way (beside the PlanetCCRMA mailing list) to
promote the spin in this sphere? Any tips are really welcome - I
  must admit its been a good 15 years since I was a student (apart
  from language school this last month - tough going on top of my
  normal work week , sheesh).
Get people on f-music-list and other CCRMA lists to blog about it.
Maybe write up a canonical blog post others can refer to - gives the
entirety of the spin concept and how students can help make it happen.
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At first I was thinking that the GSoC idea would be a good way to
recruit packagers/technical expertise but the more I think about
it, we should probably expand the idea to those interested
learning more about open source communication in general. What I
mean is we could create a role here for someone to ensure the
dialogue in the Fedora audio community keeps rolling, tags bugs
for the spin, and follows up on milestone progress toward the
final goal.
Just speaking statistically, most students don't stick around the
project after the summer is over. So a student could do some of the
seed work that would support someone doing that role ongoing,
including just working with that person directly (you Brendan? what
could you do if one or two students were working to get you ready to
maintain a new Fedora/CCRMA relationship?)
I agree with the idea of focusing on open source communication, and we
need to realize that 25% to 50% of the project time might be taken up
with communication - just because the student projects cover the
entire summer doesn't mean we should expect 40 coding hours per week.
A week is going to look more like: research, ask, wonder, ask more,
research more, code a few hundred lines, send to the mailing list,
chat, debate, decide, code some more, research, ask, then finish part
of a section. Learning to interact with the project - Fedora, CCRMA as
an upstream, and other upstream projects - is a huge part of the
learning for the students.
So consider all that when working out what can be done.
When talking to the hundreds of other projects that get together at
the annual mentor summit in Mountain View, you hear a lot of values
that go beyond "code received." These are programming student and code
is important, but it's only part of the scenario. We've had very
packaging-focused summer coding projects before, including work done
for the KDE Spin.
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If you are interested you could also list yourself as a mentor if
  you can spare the time.
I can always help...
Co-mentoring can work very well, just make sure that you have one of
you checking the schedule, checking with the student(s) regularly, and
so forth - managing the drum beat.
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What do you think, I've copied Karsten on this as well.
Well, the Planet CCRMA and Fedora Music lists are obvious places to
  look for interested users. I could also advertise in our
local-users and staff CCRMA mailing lists. Your GSoC url would be a
good starting point for the goal of the project. Do you know how
GSoC projects are supposed to work? (sorry, I don't)
Encourage people to spread the word - it's a great deal for a student,
especially one where the US$5K (iirc) goes a bit farther.


Karsten


(Thanks Karsten I have forwarded to the list)
Fedora has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code Project. We have 
added the Fedora Audio Spin as an idea [1]. At this stage the idea only 
outlines a packaging role(s), but I have been discussing with Karsten 
and Fernando that it might be a good idea that we expand on the role to 
cover all aspects of the project, not just packaging and technical 
issues (see above).
I think this could be a really good opportunity to provide the Audio 
Spin with a formal process and some much need momentum.
Here's what I think we need to start discussing:
*  how can we expand upon the role. We are not limited to one idea here. 
We could create a new one to cover other aspects of the project. Tasks 
that will need coordinating down the track are:
    - documentation / wiki's / musician's guide / community wrangling
    - testing the kick starts
    - pushing the spin through the acceptance process
* how can we promote the idea to students. What mailing lists, webblogs, 
forums etc can we use to attract students to the task (I have been 
approached by one site for an interview already - this kind of thing if 
we can get it out quick enough)
* potential mentors. Not just technical here, if we create further roles 
we will need to co-mentor those as well
* anything else? this is just a start
I will have some time a little later in the week to go over this in more 
detail, just wanted to start the ball rolling. We have a week until we 
start receiving student submissions.
Brendan
[1] 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Summer_coding_ideas_for_2012#Fedora_Audio_Crea...