Re: GSoC, anyone?

[c.]

On 8 Jan 2015, at 23:16, Carnë Draug <address@hidden> wrote:

> On 8 January 2015 at 21:58, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden> wrote:
>> Should we try to do GSoC again this year? I'm not so sure if we should
>> or not. Our results have been mixed in past years, with very low
>> success rate. Our students have passed their evaluations, but almost
>> none of them have stayed after GSoC nor have we merged in a lot of
>> useful GSoC code. Either we're doing something very wrong that we need
>> to fix before we try again, or GSoC is not for us.
>> 
>> Thoughts?
> 
> I think yes.  Maybe the problem is that the students we got were working on
> things that none of us was also doing.  They were things we would like to
> have in Octave but not enough to go and do it (otherwise, we would have done
> themselves).  I will propose that we only accept projects and mentors that
> are working on the same project at the same time.  What this means that push
> of a student would be pulled, reviewed, and pushed by the mentor right away
> since it would be mixed with the mentor work.  I realize this will limit our
> available projects a lot but should fix the problem of ending with students
> doing stuff that is never integrated in Octave.
> 
> I'd be willing to mentor a student for selected features in the image
> package and core.
> 
> Carnë

I also think we should do it.

And I agree with Carnë's arguments about being
more 'picky' about projects.
According to this point of view I will clean up 
the list of projects in the wiki removing my name 
as possible mentor from projects I don't really 
care enough about to be fully involved.

I think, though, that Jordi's concern was rather 
about the low success rate in getting students 
involved in the long term than about the usability 
of their code.

I don't have an answer to that, ideas anyone?

c.

P.S. isn't it time to start planning OctConf as well?