On Sun, 2014-09-14 at 15:29 +0200, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
I have a question, please explain me how outreach is mutually exclusive with creating great software?
Well hold up, nobody has suggested that "outreach is mutually exclusive with creating great software." Sebastien suggested that it may not be the best way to spend our funds. I get the impression that we have not sufficiently considered whether it is or not. This is something we should discuss, and I'm glad Sebastien is asking these questions. When the Foundation spends money, the goal should be to maximize its benefit to GNOME. So when approving funding for a project, we should consider how important the project is to GNOME. When deciding how much to spend on outreach, we should consider what proportion of our students become long-term contributors, how important are their contributions, how many projects fail, and how many projects are finished successfully but then languish forever in GitHub or Bugzilla and never get merged. I wonder what these numbers are. It would also be good to actually consider the value of student projects before funding them. With GSoC we just picked which students seemed most likely to successfully complete the projects they proposed, rather than actually evaluating which projects were most important to GNOME. I think we got a good set of students, but I'd rather select a promising student while rejecting the student's project proposal if the proposal is only tangential to our interests. In the past you mentioned that you think we should fund any GNOME-related project. I disagree. I'm not sure if it would be beneficial to mention specific projects, but to be blunt, I think some of our GSoC projects were a waste of money. And I have no clue how many were completed successfully, or how many were completed but never merged; if we keep track of this at all, it doesn't seem to be public. Michael
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