On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 01:53:17PM +0000, Jon Dowland wrote: > On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 09:42:17AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum > wrote: > > (1) Forbid DDs and people in the NM process waiting for > > FD/DAM to apply as students. > What if we do this, and still do not get many new people > applying? How about a policy of prioritising > non-DD/NM/DM/whatever contributions, rather than outright > forbidding established people? Uh, applicants who're already familiar with the project (both Debian and the specific GSoC project they're applying for) have a much better chance of success; applicants who are already DDs have a much easier time actually contributing than people who aren't. Hamstringing ourselves and our applicants by discouraging prior involvement is crazy. For comparison: I mentored the same project in 2006 and 2007 with different students; the 2006 student unfortunately wasn't able to get anywhere; the 2007 student has been involved in Debian as a sponsored package maintainer for a while that happened to be related to the topic, worked on academic research also related to the topic, and at the end of the summer was was one of the test cases for deployment of Debian Maintainers; he was impressively successful at the GSoC task and has been continuing with it since then. Sorry, but preferncing people with no experience or involvement is a *completely* backwards approach, however you water it down. That said, GSoC is meant to be about *learning* and *getting people involved* in the project and mentorship, so a student who's already really experienced with Debian will still need to find some area that they don't already know inside and out, aren't already involved in completely, and can find someone who knows more about it than they do to act as their mentor. Cheers, aj
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