[OSM-talk] [OSM-dev] Student Project Ideas?

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 16:31, Ian Dees <ian.dees at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason <avarab at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Mar 10, 2010 at 08:52, Graham Jones
>> <grahamjones139 at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> > Please give this a bit of thought, and add any ideas to the Wiki page!
>> > If
>> > you don't have chance to do that, an email to me will do and I will add
>> > it.
>>
>> Here's my idea:
>>
>> Can we please not make things like "Develop a Simple, Stand-Alone
>> Editor for New Users" part of the GSOC list.
>>
>> I've seen numerous failed and dead-on-arrival GSOC projects with
>> various projects that usually turned out that way because
>> inexperienced students were being handed projects that were too
>> ambitious and even if they were finished saw decay because nobody else
>> was interested in maintaining them.
>
> I think a more useful criticism would include some specific ideas...

You mean specific GSOC ideas? We'll probably have plenty of those.
What I was pointing out that just because something would be neat to
do that doesn't mean that it's appropriate for being handed to a
student for 3 months.

Once you have those ideas how are you gong to pick one? I for one think:

  * You should try to make students work on existing /active/ projects
instead of sending them off on their own for 3 months
  * In particular, assume that they'll be working for 3 months and
we'll never hear from them again. I think there are some numbers on
the % of GSOC students that stay around after the 3 months and IIRC
they're alarmingly low
  * Try to recruit people with programming experience who're already
contributing to the project in interesting ways that happen to be
students (and no, I'm not eligible). This will reduce load on mentors
  * Don't underestimate the load on mentors. I've heard from people
that did mentoring (albeit for complex projects) that spent more time
on mentoring than it would have taken them to implement the student
work themselves, and the student disappeared after 3 months so there
was no long-term gain from it.