Re: GSoC applications

[Urs Liska]

Am 09.01.2018 um 15:05 schrieb Kieren MacMillan:

Hi Urs,

I encourage, no, I urge everybody to look into their souls whether they might volunteer to mentor a project (not only those listed already but also new suggestions).

Any ideas you can think of that don’t require C++ or Scheme?

I assume this does *not* mean "gimme some Python"? :-/

I’d be happy to consider them…

Your question gave me some food for thought, and I came up with an idea that might turn out to become a brilliant move on many levels: On https://github.com/wbsoft/frescobaldi/wiki/GSoC-Guidelines#user-content-community-mentors I outlined a new inofficial GSoC role that I would like to install for this year: Community Mentors.

Community mentors are people like you who are experts in an area but not necessarily programmers. In a way they can act somewhat like product owners and scrum masters in agile development: they steer the discussion about the *use case* and the user facing design of features to be implemented. And they are responsible for keeping communication alive. In particular they should be responsible for keeping the user/developer community engaged in a project (by triggering discussions on the mailing lists). My experience in the last years showed me that most projects (and I explicitly include myself in this) tend to focus way too narrowly on the student and the mentor. Our students are not used (and often seemed too shy) to discuss with the community. As a result most projects are not actively visible for the community.

I think you could be such a community mentor for a number of projects. Some suggestions:

• reviving our old idea of a "stylesheets" openLilyLib package (improving support for alternative notation fonts and implmenting a modular way of saving/loading(/sharing) style sheets)
  Maybe Abraham could be listed as a primary mentor here (I'd be available for oll-specific issues)?
  [Just to be clear: anyone can be listed as mentor for an arbitrary number of projects, but in the end they are allowed to mentor only one project. So with listing for several projects noone risks being held accountable and ending up with several projects. But OTOH it is important to have an array of options listed on our pages, as usually it becomes a difficult issue to distribute the slots we may be given. In most years we had to "waste" slots because we couldn't match enough mentors to students.
• https://github.com/wbsoft/frescobaldi/wiki/Google-Summer-of-Code#user-content-implement-a-system-to-handle-scores-system-by-system
• http://lilypond.org/website/google-summer-of-code.html#Fix-Beaming-Patterns_002fBeam-Subdivisions-and-Tuplets
• there might be many others
  

Think about it ...

Best
Urs

Thanks,
Kieren.
________________________________

Kieren MacMillan, composer
‣ website: www.kierenmacmillan.info
‣ email: address@hidden