On Thu, Feb 24, 2011 at 02:58:00PM -0500, Kevin Cole wrote: > > I mentioned GSoC and the OLPC Contributors program but I think the > professor's looking for a "competition" rather than a "project". > Personally, I also think our students would do better with "collaboration" > rather than "competition" since (a) you don't "lose" and (b) it's > open-ended: Students who participate in such efforts go on to become > professionals who participate in such efforts and end up mentoring the > current crop of students who go on to become professionals... Ain't > recursion grand? ;-)
So the GSoC program ... There is actually a highly competitive element to it, most of which falls within the current school year. The students have to compete with other students by writing project proposals to get a chance at a paid slot over the summer. It is also conducted entirely in the written medium, and the projects involved are now quite experienced with students of different English capabilities. The only requirement is to be an enrolled student, I do not know if any age barrier exists. The proposal writing process involves: * Contacting one or more FOSS projects - You have to meet the people who put forward ideas - Ask questions and learn about the idea you are proposing for - Probably take some coding tests and similar - Show you are willing and able to communicate with the project * Putting together one or more technical proposals - Demonstrate ability to analyze a problem - Show skill thinking toward a technical solution with info on hand - Work with one or more mentors to improve the proposal pre-deadline - Get a serious proposal in by a deadline So, just the proposal process involves much of the how-to-start-participating that we want to teach students. There are usually many, many projects involved, so the competition is high but there are more opportunities. Now someone mentioned Fedora's program from last year, last called Fedora Students Contributing (FSC). I wrote about this recently[1], and the conclusion I came to is that for Fedora and Red Hat's investment, FSC gave us the same result as participating in the GSoC at a much higher cost. The one thing running our own program did was give us a chance to fund projects that weren't just software. One student completed the first version of the "Fedora Musicians Guide" as his project. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Summer_Coding_2010_projects I would only recommend resurrecting FSC if we get more sponsors who also bring in some people resources to help carry the organizational load. - Karsten [1] http://iquaid.org/2011/02/16/fedora-students-contributing-live-or-let-die/ -- name: Karsten 'quaid' Wade, Sr. Community Gardener team: Red Hat Community Architecture uri: http://TheOpenSourceWay.org/wiki gpg: AD0E0C41
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