On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 23:07:03 +0530, Aniket Pradhan wrote:
Hello people,
GSoC and Outreachy are coming, and I was wondering if we can have a project based on packaging/testing this time [0]?
It'd really be great if we could do either. However, it's great responsibility for us, and takes quite a bit of work. It's unfair on candidates if we take them on but are unable to mentor them well. So, off the top of my head:
- what is the project?
- given that we are in the neuroscience domain, what skills should the candidate already have to be successful? (we are currently struggling slightly because we don't have enough volunteers from neuroscience to help us prioritise/organise our packaging tasks; 3 months is a short period to start from 0 and also do meaningful work)
- what are the skills the candidate will learn?
- will the candidate be able to continue as a long term NeuroFedora contributor?
- What must we do to improve the likelihood that they turn into long-term contributors?
- finally and probably most importantly, who has the knowledge/time/resources to mentor the candidate(s) throughout the project period, and maybe even after?
(This is all related to the "How to Propose a Project?" bit of the commblog post.)
Us being in the neuroscience domain complicates things a little. We are right in the middle of neuroscience and software development. It is quite a niche gap. Not a lot of neuro folks do software development, and not a lot of computing folks do neuroscience. The field is not yet in a state where both sections are actively being trained in both skill sets.
GSoC would be a great outreach method to the younger audience (students) who can take an interest in packaging and learn more about the Fedora community.
Many other orgs have mentored projects based on packaging, and therefore it is not uncommon if we bring a project on the same. We can maybe have a mentored project on some other topic, but I cannot think of any other topic for our sig.
This is certainly not uncommon, but those of us that have been part of such projects generally tend to agree that packaging projects aren't the best because unless the candidate is interested in the domain of software that they are working with, they have no incentive to maintain their packages in the long run.
I would love to hear everyone's review on the same topic, and I hope we are able to submit at least one mentored project for GSoC or Outreachy this time.
Sure, but we must be sure of what it is we're doing and whether we have the resources to do it.