Terri,

In reference to your questions below, I offer these comments:

(a) I enjoyed mentoring last summer and would like to do so again. (b) We need to give this serious thought, particularly if we were to propose direct participation (rather than under the PSF umbrella). One of the weaknesses of MM3 as a GSoC project is a lack of design maturity in terms of the intercommunication structure between components of a distributed implementation. This causes the student to need to be more involved in design aspects rather than just coding. Some students would be up to the task, but others might be overwhelmed by the lack of a complete design structure. We need to identify (1) some "trivial" introductory tasks, (2) projects appropriate for GSoC that are already clearly designed, and perhaps (3) projects that still need design. If we consider a student for this third category, we need to not only make sure that the student understands to complexity of the task, but establish metrics that can be used to evaluate student performance. (d) As a part of the student "proposal", I think that we need to have the students submit a "portfolio" of prior work which we can evaluate for aspects such as clear and consistent coding, unit testing, etc. At least some of this code should be written in Python (unless the student proposal would be implemented in another language). Potential applicants could be directed to the "trivial" tasks that I mention above as a source of material to augment their portfolio if they do not already have an adequate presentation.

Richard

On Jan 9, 2013, at 2:09 PM, Terri Oda <terri@zone12.com> wrote:

Happy new year, all!

Although this year's GSoC hasn't actually been announced yet, now's a good time for us to start figuring out what we as an organization want to do.

So here's some questions to get us started:

(a) Who would like to mentor for GSoC 2013?

I'm hoping all of you who participated last year are interested in doing it again, and I'm happy to take on a few more mentors if there's anyone new who'd like to help out.

(b) What projects do we have that would be appropriate for students?

Generally we give students new features and wishlist items -- if someone has time to do a quick scan of the bug queues for Mailman/postorius/hyperkitty and suggest a list that would totally be awesome.

(c) What intro documentation do we need to make it easy for students to get ramped up?

I'd like to see:

• overview architecture documentation (probably drawn from Barry's book chapter/pycon talk)
• an updated "getting started" (basically the 5-minute guide expanded for less experienced developers)
• a VM image with everything set up for people to try (preferably Ubuntu)

Anything else you'd like to see? Anyone want to offer to start on any of these? The VM image shouldn't be to hard to set up.

(d) What do we want student proposals to look like?

We talked last year about how we'd like to have a more consistent proposal format for students to follow; can one of our more experienced admins write a proposal template & guidelines that we can have ready?

Terri

---

Mailman-Developers mailing list Mailman-Developers@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/mailman-developers Mailman FAQ: http://wiki.list.org/x/AgA3 Searchable Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-developers%40python.org/ Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/mailman-developers/richard%40nfsnet.o...

Security Policy: http://wiki.list.org/x/QIA9