[fab] Google's Summer of Code 2006

[Rahul Sundaram]

On Sat, 2006-04-15 at 18:11 -0500, Patrick W. Barnes wrote:
> Last year, Google sponsored the Summer of Code program, which introduces 
> collegiate students to open source development by connecting them with 
> mentors and providing initiative.  The Fedora Project participated and 
> provided mentoring for 12 projects.  These had mixed results but provided us 
> with some valuable tools, including our Live CD generator and a tool that 
> we're currently working on adding to our infrastructure to gather hardware 
> usage information from our users.
> 
> Google has just announced that they will sponsor the event again this year.  
> Will we participate again?
> 
> I'd really like for us to work on this program again.  It is a valuable 
> opportunity to bring new contributors to our project and to support an 
> awesome program.  This year, I think we can better involve our contributors 
> in the process, gathering more volunteers to help in the mentoring and to 
> provide suggestions and feedback.  Last year, the burden of the program 
> rested almost entirely upon Elliot.
> 
> One of the people who was accepted for the program last year was actually a 
> co-worker of mine, and I enjoyed the opportunity to help someone get started 
> with open source in such a fashion.  His results were not ideal, and I have 
> been disappointed with his failure to follow-up, but a program like this is 
> always going to have a few participants that don't measure up.  I'd very much 
> enjoy the opportunity to work with the program again, hopefully with better 
> results.  As a bonus, every student that we mentor will bring $500 for our 
> participation.  That $500 per student could be a valuable addition to our 
> budget.
> 
> Google will be accepting organization applications until May 1st.  Can we 
> participate?

Last time many of the projects that we choose to pursue within Google
SoC were those that required ongoing development and maintenance rather
than simple independent tasks and pretty much all of them have failed
miserably.  If we are participating this year we should identify very
specific tasks that people can do and walk away from and still be
beneficial. 

Rahul