Re: Google Summer of Code 2008
On 27/02/08 at 11:26 -0800, Steve Langasek wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 06:52:56PM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> > On 27/02/08 at 11:33 +0100, Francesco P. Lovergine wrote:
> > > I'm not completely persuaded this is correct. Someone should explain
> > > why an existing contributor does not concentrate his/her efforts on
> > > the choosen project instead of wasting time in other tasks
>
> > Because all DDs are human, tend to have very large TODO list, and if
> > given more time, tend to work on their TODO list first? I'm not saying
> > that students that were DD did nothing of their time during GSoc, but
> > most of them failed their projects, which defeats the purpose of GSoc,
> > makes the GSOC organizers unhappy, and will probably cause Debian to
> > have less slots this year again.
>
> Er, by what metric have these students "failed" their projects?
>
> The summer has finished, and it's about time I summarised how we got
> on. We had 9 Summer of Code students working for us, and we had a 100%
> success rate this year. Woo! Last year we only managed 6 successful
> projects out of 10, so that's a major improvement.
>
> http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel-announce/2007/10/msg00001.html
>
> I really can't figure out what you're saying, here. AFAICS, we had
> significantly *better* results when choosing GSoC projects submitted by
> existing Debian contributors. Where are these failures you're talking
> about?
My definition of failure is: "(what was achieved) < (what I expected to
be achieved, given the skills of the people assigned and the time they
were supposed to spend on the project)".
That's of course subjective, but I think that the evaluation done by the
mentors is subjective too. How were the GSOC projects evaluated? Were they
given goals to fullfill? We probably need to improve the descriptions of
the projects a bit, so people know a bit more what they are expected to do.
Also, as I said earlier, in some cases, the mentor might have had a
very difficult decision about failing (or not) the student, since the
student is probably a friend, who might have badly needed the money,
etc.
--
| Lucas Nussbaum
| lucas@lucas-nussbaum.net http://www.lucas-nussbaum.net/ |
| jabber: lucas@nussbaum.fr GPG: 1024D/023B3F4F |
Reply to: