Minutes of Summer of Code meeting (06/03/2008)

[Vincent Untz <vuntz gnome org>]

Hi,

Here are the minutes from the Summer of Code meeting from last Thursday.
Apologies for the slight delay.

Note that I'm sure many of the people with assigned actions below would be
happy to get some help for those actions, so feel free to help :-)

Vincent

====

Present:
 Adam Schreiber
 Buddhika Laknath Semage
 Christian Kellner
 Gabriel Burt
 Johannes Schmid
 Lucas Rocha
 Marco Barisione
 Rob Taylor
 Sandy Armstrong
 Vincent Untz
 (maybe one or two other people?)

ACTION: Adam to work on setting up and announcing the Ideas wiki page.

ACTION: Adam to check the SoC wiki page and update it a bit.

ACTION: Ryan to make sure the application form was received.

ACTION: Ryan (and Christian) to follow up on an updated logo for SoC.

ACTION: Christian to send mails to lots of people who can be potential
        mentors and/or who can participate to the selection committee.
        (Note: we need to know the google account of each mentor)

ACTION: Lucas and Vincent to build a small team to overview the global
        progress of the students, and who will act as the point of
        contact to mentors and students in case of problems. Sandy is
        willing to help in this team.

ACTION: Adam to work on getting good documentation for mentors.

ACTION: Marco and Buddhika to work on getting good documentation for
        students.

ACTION: all potential mentors to subscribe to soc-mentors-list.

Discussion
==========

 + Great to see people coming to the meeting. We'll be trying to
   distribute a bit more the work among more people this year. It will
   also make it possible to have new administrators who will have some
   experience next year.

 + A common feeling among the administrators is that SoC went well from
   an organization point of view last year. So we won't change too many
   things this year. For example, the rules to select students are
   likely to stay the same.

 + Ryan already completed the application form for GNOME, but we didn't
   receive any ACK from Google saying that the application was received.
   Ryan will follow up.

 + It's time to start collecting ideas for students. We'll dump all
   ideas on a wiki page and triage them later, but before students
   can start applying. It's an important step since this is where most
   students get their ideas from. A good basis is probably last year's
   ideas that weren't accepted. Adam will take care of this.
   We might focus on projects about improving the integration between
   various GNOME modules, but we need to be open about all types of
   projects (new modules, bling, etc.). We're also open to ideas for
   things that are not officially GNOME but that are related to our
   stack in some way (fd.o, gstreamer if they don't get accepted for
   SoC, cairo, conduit, etc.).

 + We need to clean up the SoC wiki page:
   http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2008
   Ryan did some preliminary work, Adam will continue.

 + We need an updated logo. Ryan already asked Máirín. Christian will
   make sure it happens.

 + It's also time to recruit people to be mentors, and also to
   participate in the selection committee. The selection committee is
   the group evaluating and selecting the students/projects; it is made
   of around 10 people. Christian will take care of this.

 + In the past, we were a bit slow to start commenting on applications.
   We need to be careful and do this as soon as we start receiving
   applications. It's important, especially when we have to ask
   questions to the student.

 + One of the important parts of SoC is making sure the students feel
   good and that they can progress on their project. It's part of the
   mentor job, but it's better to also have a small team to overview
   this and make sure progress reports are sent. This team has the whole
   picture of SoC. Sandy stepped up. We need more volunteers for that.

 + It was pointed out that it was not clear for mentors how to handle a
   project which is in trouble: the right way is to contact
   administrators, but it was probably not communicated enough. Also,
   soc-mentors-list is a good list for this, since it's private and only
   mentors are subscribed there.
   We'll create a more solid mentors page on the wiki. Adam volunteered
   for this.

 + Similarly, having better documentation for students would be great.
   Past SoC students are well-placed to do this. Marco and Buddhika will
   take of this.

 + The gnome-love mailing list was used for GHOP and it turned out it
   worked quite well. So we'll likely use this list as the main list for
   SoC, instead of gnome-soc-list, which was a bit too quiet last year.

-- 
Les gens heureux ne sont pas pressés.