Google Summer of Code 2011 Improvements

This page collects suggestions and ideas for improvement of OSGeo Google Summer of Code.

• Penguin mentoring: as penguins are known to take care together of youngs, forming crèches, I'd suggest to mimic this behaviour in GSoC. Each student would still have an official assigned mentor, but he/she can also ask other mentors for help, for example on soc mailing list. This has been done in past editions asking to the project's developers community as a whole, and I think it helps the student's integration in the dev team. Penguin mentoring would act as a third help source, in addition to official mentor and developers' community. It would be especially useful when the official mentor is not reachable.

• More project interaction: Some (virtually all) SoC projects can benefit from more interactions with other related projects. This can be done with a net of cross-project proposals, more discussion among mentors and students from related projects, meetings on IRC...

• Rule of Extensibility: The student should write code so that it should be easy for another developer to pick up the task, if he/she is not able to continue working on the project after SoC. In particular, mentors should prefer a more readable code with less features, than a code that became messy next to deadline just to quickly finish.

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