Re: Towards more collaboration between the academic world and the GNOME community

["Carlos Fenollosa" <topopardo topopardo com>]

First of all I'm going to introduce myself, because I've been on the list for some time but I haven't posted anything until now. I'm Carlos and know some of you from the latest Guadec, but I've been using Gnome for five years and marketing free software amongst local friends and the University. I'm finishing my Computer Engineering degree and an Artificial Intelligence masters, and I have good contacts with some people on my department and on the CE School because I've been collaborating with many student associations.

Here goes the point of view from a student. At least in my CE degree there is many people using Gnome/Ubuntu, but they develop their final-degree projects on Java/Windows because that's what their counselors demand. Some others work on their projects working in a company, so the result is completely proprietary/private software.

Some ideas? Well, extending the "summer of code" to the whole year, like having a list of quite big projects and ideas. Just patching the program X to add a feature Y isn't going to work as a final-degree project. We have also to convince the School counselors (say professors), most of which never touched anything but UNIX or Windows. And I'm afraid that this will be the hard part.

Going to a higher level, say grad students, it's going to be very difficult to find any suitable project for them, at least in my area (AI). 

To sum up: I think that we need a list of projects, even if it's an open list, to have a starting place for students. Rewarded projects (bounties or SoC-like) would be a plus, I guess. Then we need posters and promotional stuff. If we can come with all of this, I can try to speak with some professors and School staff and introduce them the initiative. My school bosses in particular aren't very free-software friendly because we have many collaboration projects with Microsoft, but both the students and the laboratory staff are pro-FS. Anyway, students are almost free to use any language/platform they like for their final-degree projects.

Any more ideas? IMHO the big deal will come trying to convince the professors, not the students.

Greetings,
Carlos

On 4/29/07, Quim Gil <qgil gnome org> wrote:

On 4/25/07, Ted Gould < ted gould cx> wrote:
> They'd prefer to say
> that they have a project from Novell/Redhat/Intel/etc.

This shouldn't be a problem for GNOME.

Sounds like there is an opportunity for collaboration with the
companies in the advisory board at the GNOME Foundation. The big ones
have surely university programs, and people working (full time?) on
them. They might find interesting ways to play at a GNOME level. Once
the doors are open and the branding is in place finding projects for
GNOME research might be easier. Co-branding with GNOME logos too,
these projects love logos!

Nobody i.e. in a university department wants to help kicking off this
initiative? This looks like one of these projects progressing once
someone decides to pull it firmly.


--
Quim Gil /// http://desdeamericaconamor.org
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Best regards from Carlos Fenollosa
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