Re: academic cooperation

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Thu, 2007-11-08 at 08:25 -0700, Kevin Kubasik wrote:
> While research is awesome, I know there are also classes that just
> require students to track an open source project and eventually submit
> a patch (its more the process thats being taught then the actual
> coding itself, how to work within an existing framework) I know the
> University of Maryland has such a class, I think that closer
> integration with classes like these could be invaluable. Think, a long
> list of (not impossible, but more than 1 or 2 line fixes) bugs that we
> could share with a school or class, the flip side is of course that we
> would need some major man hours to be available for patch review and
> comment etc. (Think GSoC maybe?)

I know we're all excited about code, but...

A few years back, we had a communications student do Gnome
documentation work to fulfill the internship requirement
for her degree.  I'm afraid the documentation team is just
not equipped to do proper mentoring, and I fear she didn't
get as much out of it as she could have.  We, however, got
a whole hell of a lot of documentation written by somebody
who actually knows how to write well.

It would be grand to actively pursue these sorts of programs,
but I'm not sure how to proceed on that.  At the very least,
it would require a documentation old-timer who can devote a
fair amount of time to the students.

--
Shaun