[OSM-dev] GSOC 2014 - Introduction

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 6:48 AM, Eric Marsden <eric.marsden at free.fr> wrote:

> >>>>> "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>
>   Hi Serge,
>
>   You are being unfair with at least some of the students who have
>   worked on GSoC with Openstreetmap in the past.


I did say "to the best of my recollection"- I don't remember every student
or project. :)


> 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.)
>

I suppose this is the second issue I have... that most of the time the
proposals to work on OSM code are to work on projects that are either
entirely new or part of something that's semi-obscure.

This criteria is more complex, of course. There are many projects which are
interesting and potentially benefitial to OSM, but aren't in wide use, or
don't exist yet.

But at the same time, we have some fairly concrete needs now for things
which are core to the project. The OSM website, for example, could use some
additional help (though it's development is certainly more active in the
last year than it has been in the past), the rendering has been converted
to Carto, but the number of outstanding rendering issues continues to grow.
I'd love to see someone work on that too. The work that was done on cgimap
was great. I wonder what else could be done to speed up core API calls, or
if there's some other pain point we should be putting effort towards?

These jobs are certainly less "sexy" than a whole new project involving
computer vision or complex routing, etc. but they're far more realistic to
be finished, and they'd be of immediate use to the OSM user community.

GSoC is such a great opportunity for both the project and the coder. I'd
love to see more coders inside OSM apply for it. We have so many things to
work on, and such a large community to draw from.

- Serge
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/dev/attachments/20140217/965cc4b6/attachment.html>