1. Summer of Code 2007 Debrief

1.1. How we did it

Board requested Vincent to organize SoC
- Everyone was busy, Vincent was assigned to make a call for fresh-new SoC admins
Two kickoff meetings
- Meeting 1 (February 28)
  - Minutes
  - Lucas, Christian and Raphael volunteered as SoC admins
- Meeting 2 (March 7)
  - Minutes
  - Infrastructure was discussed: separate repo? same repo with account to students?
  - Selection Committee idea officialy decided
February 22: SoC 2007 wiki page created
March 9: pool of ideas was announced and started
March 12: Behdad subscribed GNOME as SoC organization
March 19: call for members in Selection Committee (discussion among admins + list of invitations + mails sent)
March 14: triaging of the ideas (Rock Stars, Alternatives, Underground)
March 26: student application deadline
April 28: first welcome message to students (Read)
May 2: students progress reports were requested to be delivered each monday (notifications were sent to lagged students) (Read)
August 21: mentors were reminded about mid-term survey (Read)
Mid-term survey was completed during GUADEC
August 21: final reports were requested from students (Read)
August 21: mentors were reminded about final survey (Read)

Weekly report and having Lucas to ping missing ones
A selection committee for choosing the projects
Comments from community about the submitted applications (Google accounts can be a barrier though)
Applications were better written and there was a better involvement from each student to clarify and improve their applications and to better define their goals to be achieved at the end of SoC
Sponsorship for students to attend GUADEC
GTK+ books for two students during GUADEC
Welcome messages to students and mentors

We weren't strict about missing or late reports.and that beat us at the end for one student+mentor
There was one case of an unknown/untrusted mentor (hard to contact and get feedback about student's progress)
We should encourage more mailing list posts to create an atmosphere of liveness during SoC
Require/suggest student-mentor communication on the relevant upstream project mailing list
Pool of ideas started too late. We didn't have enough quality ideas when student applications started
We were not reactive enough to applications: we should have commented earlier, saying "we want more details" (although we did better this year than last year)
We need more/better communication and summarizing at the end of the program
Certain things were done at the last minute (for instance, the mid-term and final surveys)

Many mentoring organizations ask applicants (or students during the bonding period) to provide a bug fix to show that they can find they way in the code.
Standard for applications with defined goals, deliverables, etc.
Define a quota for new ideas (not listed in the pool).
SoC as a yearlong project with the list of ideas being created from January. SoC doesn't need to be a Google SoC-only thing.
We should go over and send the students either "Congrats on finishing, now hang around #gnome-hackers" or "We're sorry... hang around #gnome-hackers".