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Google Summer of Code & Highly Open Participation Contest: How successful is GNOME?

Submitted by admin on Mon, 05/25/2009 - 14:41
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Author(s): 
André C. Klapper, Daniel G. Siegel

For several years now, GNOME has participated in Google's Summer of Code (GSoC) contest, providing university students an opportunity to work on open source projects during the summer and to get some experience with culture and processes of the open source world (and some money of course). GNOME also participated in Google's first Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP) in 2007/2008 for highschool students with much smaller tasks compared to GSoC. 

Many members of the GNOME community offered their time and knowledge to empower the students to successfully finish their projects. Lots of code has been written, but how successful has this been? How much work was actually included in GNOME and shipped by default? What are the reasons why code was not used in the end? Was the GNOME project successful in embracing these students and keep them interested in continuing to work and contribute in our community, or were most students only interested in experience and/or money and disappeared after the project was done? How can we improve the situation and keep participants in our community? 

In their talk, André C. Klapper and Daniel G. Siegel will try to answer these questions, analyze the cause why projects succeeded or not and if they were included into GNOME.

Author bio: 
André C. Klapper was one of the GNOME GHOP organizers, is part of the bugsquad and the release team. He works as the maemo.org bugmaster for Openismus. Daniel G. Siegel has been a GSoC student himself in 2007, a mentor in 2008, is one of the GNOME GSoC organizers in 2009 and maintains Cheese, a nifty webcam application.