Now that the initial part of my project is almost over, I realized I’m still not really integrated into the MW community IMHO. If there where tools available for mentors and students to easily contact each other, it would be so much more easy to share idea’s with each other and coordinate efforts to solve problems. Sadly, this is not the case. Therefore I decided to send all mentors (and Brion) an email (which I got from Yaron) proposing to create some sort of WM GSoC group. This group would need to provide easy accessible contact info of all the WM GSoC participants and also offer some form of group discussion ability (at such moments I so wish Google Wave was already publicly available). It would have the following benefits:
- Allow everyone to share idea’s. Better to have input from multiple people then only one.
- Multiple people who can help you out. If your mentor is off-line, or isn’t sure about something, you can always ask someone else.
- Students that remain active in the community after GSoC, and the mentors, can coordinate the GSoC effort for WM next year. This would include letting people in the WM community know about GSoC and find potential mentors. Search potential students and help inform the ones the apply about where to find docs and other relevant stuff.
- It would simply (IMHO) be more fun, and therefore increase the chance the students remain active in the community.
I’m now waiting for the feedback, and hoping something awsome will come from this 🙂