Talk:Google Summer of Code
TODO
- there should probably be a new GSoC category to easily find all related pages
Talk
23. We're mixing up related projects and systems here - taxidraw and FGMS are not FlightGear
- That should not be a problem at all, there are a number of open source projects that were repeatedly accepted for GSoC, but which mostly served as "proxies" for other related projects, i.e. the KDE project serves as an umbrella for all sorts of KDE related tools. This also applies to Mozilla. The same could be said for FlightGear. It would probably be a good idea to write down all FlightGear related projects (atlas, fgrun, fgsd, terragear, taxidraw etc) and list ideas/feature requests for possible projects. A good start might be to look at the sourceforge trackers of each project.
8. Add to list of ideas for student projects
- One easy thing to do would be to encourage people to start their own wiki pages with project ideas or even run a forum poll for viable GSoC projects. The same could be done to get a list of people who might be interested in mentoring or participating as students. There should probably be a sticky topic (announcement) posted to the forums, because these are more available to the average user than the mailing lists are.
9. Question: Not everyone has time to camp out on IRC all day, Curt votes for IRC being an option
- IRC should definitely be optional, posting IRC transcripts seems like a good idea - it is probably better to use primarily the wiki for all GSoC related communications, or maybe even set up a subforum for the GSoC 2011 application/participation that allows people to easily keep track of all conversations going on, which would also have the benefit of being automatically "logged" and easily accessible. Calls for project ideas, mentors and ideas could similarly be posted to such a sub forum, collected there and evaluated to be incorporated here.
- BZFlag (whom I've referenced before) use IRC almost exclusively for their dev talk even outside of GSoC activity, so it was natural for them to use it. The key is that the mentors and, especially, students be easily accessible. Email can be used to get someone's attention, but the dev discussions need to be in the open. I guess Wiki pages, if they are advertised to the devel mailing list and IRC, should be visible enough too.
- RatOmeter 19:10, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
13. OK so we missed the bus this year - why don't we offer our own code bounty similar to GSoC?
On a much smaller scale with smaller rewards. People have been asking how they can contribute monetarily to FG. A few folk chipping in 20 EUR, GBP or USD would make a decent bounty. We'd need to choose the student and mentor him/her just like in GSoC. They'd learn, we'd learn, we'd (hopefully) get useful code AND we don't need to wait till next year.
- The idea is interesting, but there is another option to really test the infrastructure in place and see how things can be improved for GSoC 2011, by simply applying at http://www.nlnet.nl for sponsorship. The next deadline for "small projects" is April, 1st: http://nlnet.nl/news/2010/20100201-call-en.html There is also the possibility to get funded without any deadlines for applications: http://nlnet.nl/foundation/can_do.html
Discuss. [An issue here is to set up the FlightGear Foundation/Trust]
- There are various things here to keep in mind, an FG Foundation/Trust would be desirable, but from a coding point of view it is not as important as the project's infrastructure itself, i.e. migrating the CVS repository to a git repository, providing also the base package via git, as well as splitting off the aircraft folder from the base package, would surely help improve the situation significantly.