The best part of Fedora Summer Coding 2010 has begun: students are working on their projects with mentors and related communities. Â Although some of it may happen on the program discussion list, most of that work should be in those related communities. Â We’ll start seeing student and mentor blog posts on the Fedora Planet, and there is soon going to be a stand-alone planet blog aggregator for just this program.
The announcement email explains everything nicely, with a list of accepted projects, and then details about funding. Â We’re still working on updating and cleaning up the wiki pages.
The proposal review process was a challenge. Â We missed our first deadline, then our second, and moved in to a few days where we just didn’t say anymore when things were going to be done until they were. Â We finally reached a good set of decisions about which proposals to accept and fund. Â In the end, we were six days late past the original deadline, and two days in to the actual student coding schedule. Â I’ve proposed a minor adjustment to the schedule that puts the onus of making up the lost time on the mentors who lost it in the first place.
Part of this challenge was having to manually read, sort, and discuss proposals on the private mentor mailing list. Â The proposals are all on the Fedora Project wiki, so managing and commenting was more difficult. Â This was a result of starting the program from scratch without pre-building new infrastructure; in the future we’ll know more what we need by comparison to this experience.