Re: GSoC 2009 coming up

[Kai Blin]

On Tuesday 17 February 2009 04:41:11 Brian Vincent wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 14, 2009 at 2:39 AM, Kai Blin  wrote:
> > We should also investigate possible changes to the requirements (weekly
> > reports to the mailing list come to mind). Maarten, any comments?
>
> My gut instinct was weekly reports would be a bad idea for students - of
> course they're just going to procrastinate until the last month and then do
> all the work at once.  Yes, Kai, I realize you were the exception to that
> rule.

That's not going to work anyway. There's a mid-term evaluation you're going to 
get failed at if you didn't produce anything until the mid-term. :)
> Then my second thought was: "Hey, if this was the real world their manager
> would certainly be expecting progress reports.  Therefore mentors should
> too."   And, it makes for simple updates to include for WWN issues.  I
> think it'd be interesting to weekly or bi-weekly reports, but I think
> mentors will need to apply a little tactful pressure in order to get the
> status report updates.

My biggest motivation for requiring weekly status updates is that in the past 
years I had a hard time following the GSoC projects I was not involved with 
directly. At WorldForge, we required weekly reports to the mentor at first 
and then decided that the weekly reports should go to the developer mailing 
list. That kept everybody informed what was going on.

Also, if the weekly reports don't only include "that's what I did last week" 
but also "this is my plan for the next week", students can get early feedback 
if whatever they're planning to do next looks like a bad idea to some other 
developer. It also helps integrating the students in the community, as 
they're not only talking to their mentor.

Cheers,
Kai

GSoC 2009 coming up

[Owen Rudge]

> My biggest motivation for requiring weekly status updates is that in the past 
> years I had a hard time following the GSoC projects I was not involved with 
> directly. At WorldForge, we required weekly reports to the mentor at first 
> and then decided that the weekly reports should go to the developer mailing 
> list. That kept everybody informed what was going on.

I would say this seems sensible - the weekly reports would not 
necessarily have to be greatly detailed, but I imagine it would help to 
keep students on track, and would enable the rest of the community to 
know what's going on with the students. From experience, I would say 
that I probably only tended to post on the lists when I had specific 
problems, or patches to submit, so a weekly update would have likely 
resulted in more interaction.

Cheers,