cvs commit: www/en/projects/ideas ideas.xml

[Robert Watson]

On Thu, 20 Mar 2008, Aryeh M. Friedman wrote:

> This is probally the wrong place to ask but who do I talk to about getting a 
> project (ports 2.0) included in SoC?

The basic SoC model is this: open source projects apply to Google to 
participate in the programme.  Students then apply to participate by 
submitting proposals to participating open source projects through Google. 
Open source projects then review the proposals, and fill up to the number of 
slots they have been assigned by Google from the proposals they have received. 
Each student will be assigned a mentor who is a developer (committer) on the 
open source project to guide them through working with the project, help them 
with design, implementation, testing, etc.  At the end of the day, this means 
that for any particular technical project, it must be:

(1) Proposed by a student
(2) Accepted by the open source project
(3) Have an appropriate and willing mentor developer (committer)

Students are welcome to propose any work they like, but are most likely to 
succeed in the application process if there is a developer invested in seeing 
the project happen, and willing to mentor the.  We find that the most 
successful proposals are frequently ones where applying students have 
contacted a developer in advance to ask them to review the idea they are 
proposing, as the idea is most likely to both meet the needs of the project, 
have an appropriate and willing mentor, and be in scope for the technical 
background and abilities of the student.  This latter part is a serious 
consideration, as students who have used a C compiler for three months will 
most likely not be comfortable working with the UFS file system code, for 
example.

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge