Re: Seeking Google SoC Mentors

Magnus Hagander wrote:
> On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 09:21:42AM +0000, Dave Page wrote:
>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
>>>> Well, here's a question. Given the recent discussion re full
>>>> disjunction, I'd like to know what sort of commitment we are going to
>>>> give people who work on proposed projects.
>>> Um, if you mean are we going to promise to accept a patch in advance of
>>> seeing it, the answer is certainly not. Still, a SoC author can improve
>>> his chances in all the usual ways, primarily by getting discussion and
>>> rough consensus on a spec and then on an implementation sketch before
>>> he starts to do much code. Lots of showstopper problems can be caught
>>> at that stage.
>> We cannot necessarily expect the students to work this way without
>> guidance if they are not familiar with our processes before they start.
>> The mentors should be there to guide not just with the technical aspects
>> of the project, but the procedural as well imho.
>
> IIRC, last time we had a pgsql-students (or similar) mailinglist for the
> SoC people. That was closed. Perhaps that's a bit counterproductive - it's
> better to get introduced to the "normal way of doing things" right away?
> With the help of the mentor, of course.

Yes. The other issue though is that initial project proposal scoring and
discussion is done on a private Google site by the mentors. I don't know
if we're allowed to make the proposals public before they get accepted
by Google in case the students copy or improve each others proposals.
>From their (and Google's) point of view their proposals are essentially
job applications.

Once they've been ranked, and Google have approved the top-N projects I
guess it's open season!

Regards, Dave