[Soc-coordination] Possible GSoC idea: (Near) real-time updates of (UDD) bug view

[Stefano Zacchiroli]

On Thu, Mar 07, 2013 at 10:06:06AM +0100, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
> My plan would be to monitor BTS and archive changes using e.g. inotify.
> That would be part of a rewrite of the core of UDD. I'm not very much
> motivated about mentoring a student on that, unless it's a very good
> student. (I plan to work on that myself at some point)

So, other projects, most notably those who tend to get *a lot* of
applications due to their popularity as proper software development
projects, have best practices for these cases.  For instance, one is to
have some simple "test" that students should pass and include the result
of their work as part of the application; if they don't, or if the
result is poor, they get ranked very low.

An example I'm familiar with is, for a FOSS project that has some kind
of UI with an about dialog, "include in your application a patch that
add your name somewhere in the about dialog". This is very simple to do,
but shows that the students have the minimum skill to find the code,
install all its build requirements, do the build, produce a minimal
patch, etc.  This is a general practice we might consider to reduce both
evaluation load and the risk of being disappointed later on.

More to your case, I fully understand having high expectations before
being willing to mentor a student. So, how about devising a small
exercise, which somehow measures the minimum skills you expect to be
willing to mentor?  It might seem draconian, but after all we do not
want to *force* anyone to mentor students they're not happy with. Some
exercise like the above might be a compromise.

Cheers.
-- 
Stefano Zacchiroli  . . . . . . .  zack at upsilon.cc . . . . o . . . o . o
Maître de conférences . . . . . http://upsilon.cc/zack . . . o . . . o o
Debian Project Leader . . . . . . @zack on identi.ca . . o o o . . . o .
« the first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club »
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