[OSM-dev] GSOC 2014 - Introduction

[Eric Marsden]

>>>>> "sw" == Serge Wroclawski <emacsen at gmail.com> writes:

  sw> What very few of them had, to the best of my recollection, was a long
  sw> standing history of being part of the existing OpenStreetMap community.
  sw> Some didn't have an account, others signed up the day they applied.
  sw> 
  sw> When those applicants were accepted, the results have always been
  sw> disappointing. Some only did half the project, some a quarter, some wrote
  sw> documentation for systems that they never developed, and others never did
  sw> anything at all. It appears that the only thing these students were looking
  sw> for was some money, and they were using the Google Summer of Code program,
  sw> and the OpenStreetMap project to get it.

  Hi Serge,

  You are being unfair with at least some of the students who have
  worked on GSoC with Openstreetmap in the past. Some of them have
  executed their planned work fully but have not seen their contribution
  taken up beyond the project, probably due to a lack of
  commitment/followup from their mentors and from Openstreetmap
  developers in general. (I say this as someone who has mentored in the
  past, and been insufficiently active to get the produced code, which
  does map matching and travel time analysis on OSM data, into wide use.)

     http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Routing/Travel_Time_Analysis
  
  This being said, I do agree with your argument that we should
  encourage (or even limit ourselves to) projects from students who have
  already undertaken development on areas related to OSM, or projects
  proposed by current OSM developers who can ensure takeup. 
  
-- 
Eric Marsden