All year long people say to me, “This or that project will be perfect for Google Summer of Code.”
Where are all those projects? Not on the Fedora ideas page.
Folks, check this out – your idea doesn’t have to be complete, or even contain much more than a few sketchy use cases. Sometimes you just need to spark an idea in the student, something to become passionate about.
If you aren’t sure if you can mentor, put your idea up anyway. If a strong student or three shows up, mentors can be found.
You may wonder why this matters so much to me? Quite simply, we missed our chance at being in last year’s Summer of Code because we didn’t have an ideas page.
I look at the page now, there are great ideas there, but not very many of them. I know that the Fedora Project and JBoss.org folks have many more ideas in them. A strong ideas page is an essential part of the application.
If you are interested in helping Fedora/JBoss.org to get in to this year’s Summer of Code, or want to help run the program after that, join up to the cross-project mentor list and ask what you can do.
I joined the mentor list a few days ago, but it’s still pending. Also, a bit more marketing will be good.