From: Austin Appel <scorche15_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 06 Mar 2012 08:20:13 -0700

So then...

Frank sent en email out on February 10th regarding what we need to pull
together and do in order to participate in Google's Summer of Code
(GSoC) program this year. As you likely know (or have figured out), the
response to the email was...underwhelming

As the main drum-beater/organisation admin for Rockbox for GSoC, I have
decided not to make the effort to apply for Summer of Code this year.

I still would like to see us participate in future years. I still feel
that Google's Summer of Code is a great benefit to us as a project and
the open source community at-large. It funds Rockbox development,
attracts new developers to our project, and just plain gets-stuff-done.


If we decide that Google Summer of Code is still worth participating in
(I can't be the only person who thinks so), there are a number of things
we need to do before next year's application period:

First, we need to re-evaluate how we feel about GSoC. We were
super-excited about it for the first number of years. However, I (at
least) get the general feeling that the community in general has a very
blasé feeling towards GSoC now. This is the main reason why I (and
others) feel that it is best to take a year off. I don't know what we
need or what I am expecting of the Rockbox community to fix this, but
something needs to be done.

We need to completely re-visit the entire ideas list (
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SummerOfCode2012 ). Most of these ideas are
carried over from past years which many of us feel differently about now
than we did in the past. While we don't typically have official
maintainers over specific areas of Rockbox, you all tend to specialise
in a few areas. I am sure there are ideas in your bucket list of things
you would like to see implemented, but have no time for. These can go
on this page. Of course, don't just put a single sentence listing the
idea - flesh it out! We could likely use the page as a sort of
more-detailed version of http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/MrSomeonesTodoList
. Don't worry about difficulty level for now, but at least make sure it
is something that could potentially take a few months for someone with a
beginner-to-moderate skill level.

Most importantly, we need core developers who are ready and willing to
donate a bit of their time towards mentoring a student. This doesn't
take a massive amount of time (well, it shouldn't), as we tend to urge
students towards using the community as their mentors, but some
investment needs to be made.

Feel free to discuss further - especially if you might have any ideas to
help to fix this.

- Austin 'scorche' Appel
Received on 2012-03-06