[QGIS-Developer] Post-mortem of application to Google Summer of Code

[Greg Troxel]

Emma Hain <emma at north-road.com> writes:

> Hi Greg
> Thanks for replying - that is a very interesting read - and somewhat
> disheartening. So my response is, is this something we get involved with or
> not?
> My thoughts on getting involved in this was additional funding to build up
> and mentor up and coming QGIS developers. Is there are way to triage this
> process so it does benefit us?
>
> Thanks
> Em

My take is that people sort into

  A) generally able and willing to spend some time helping new people
  trying to contribute, but who may be a little confused, for the good
  of the project

    1) GSoC is fine and they are happy to volunteer to GSoC-mentor
    (written that way to separate from helping people separately from an
    explicit GSoC agreement).

    2) they don't want to volunteer for Google and they just step back

  B) they aren't able/willing to spend time helping out new people

and that A1 people do GSoC-mentoring and the rest don't.  That's fine,
and I don't think the project needs to do anything in particular.

I don't think it's a good idea to try to move people from B to A1 by
paying GSoC-mentors.  I think it causes too many issues that have downsides
in terms of the overall social contract.

I don't think it's feasible to move people from A2 to A1 by paying
enough, as the org stipend for GSoC isn't going to pay GSoC-mentors
$500/hr, and arguably it shouldn't.  If one is paid and others aren't,
that's going to cause trouble.  And if mentors get paid more than people
doing paid development, that's also trouble.  And then there's people
helping out random contributors.

Certainly it is normal for open source projects to participate in GSoC,
and I don't mean to suggest that QGIS not do that.  Clearly in many
organizations there are a significant number of people willing to
GSoC-mentor.

Overall, I would only suggest the the project be sensitive to the fact
that A2 people exist (and not treat them like they are crazy or
unreasonable, which so far has been entirely a non-problem).  This is
mostly a tone thing, perhaps a bit of "If you're comfortable
volunteering as a mentor".  I wrote because it appeared that people
didn't realize this.

Greg