From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_rockbox.org>
Date: Wed, 19 Mar 2008 10:39:17 +0100 (CET)

Hi

Since we've now officially been accepted as a mentor organization in this
years Google's Summer of Code, I've tried to write down some ideas that I have
and that have been discussed on IRC lately etc. I'm very interested in
comments and feedback on them.

They are:

A. Weekly Reports
B. Dual-mentor
C. Questions for Students

A. Weekly Reports

We should insist on getting weekly, public, reports on what happens. We should
push the students somewhat harder this year to be more public from the start
since there's rarely much reason to keep things private between the mentor and
student only (of course some stuff will and should still be private). The
sooner the work and code gets seen, reviewed and commented by the larger
community the better. Of course weekly reports would also be used to track the
progress and to allow everyone else to see how they can assist, should help be
needed.

B. Dual-mentor

Already from start we should assign an official backup-mentor for each primary
mentor that is assigned a student. This way, the student will get two skilled
people to bounce things with, and the two mentors can bounce things between
themselves easier and if one of them are away or similar it'll be an easier
situation since the other mentor would be involved enough to cover from the
other's absense.

C. Questions

Questions that we can ask all students who apply with a project.

The purpose of the questions is to get more hard facts about the student's
intensions, background and current level. I want a few basic questions that
are fairly quickly and easily answered to, but hopefully tell quite a bit
about the person.

My suggested 6 questions are:

When answering these questions, please try to explain as good as possible and
"sell yourself" as we might use the answers you provide as basis for selecting
whom to accept as students. Your answers will not become public, but will be
read by Rockbox committers/gsoc mentors.

1. How many hours per week do you have planned/scheduled for your gsoc work,
    should it get accepted? Any vacations or other time-consuming unrelated
    stuff going on? (gsoc is roughly 12 weeks. 40 hours per week make 480 hours
    of work.)

2. Have you built Rockbox yourself from source before?

3. What programming experience do you have, and in which languages? If those
    don't include C, please tell us how you intend to deal with this lack.

4. What open source experiences do you have?

5. Have you previously been involved in Rockbox? If so, how?

6. Do you currently own a DAP? Have you owned any in the past?

-- 
  Daniel Stenberg -- http://www.rockbox.org/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/

Received on 2008-03-19