Re: Google Summer of Code 2009

[Jim Whitehead II <jnwhiteh@...>]

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 10:58 PM, John Belmonte <john@neggie.net> wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 6:12 AM, Jim Whitehead II <jnwhiteh@gmail.com> wrote:
>> In general we may want to consider hosting an entirely separate wiki
>> for GSoC this year.  The main reason I say this is part of the
>> feedback we received last year was that the information was difficult
>> to find and not formatted very well.  We are somewhat constrained by
>> the lua-users.org wiki and from conversations in the past it doesn't
>> seem like there is any actual plans to make any movement to one of the
>> more modern packages (for a number of reasons).
>>
>> I'm not sure what domain it should fall under, but I suspect having a
>> Google Summer of Code wiki linked off the main http://lua.org webpage,
>> regardless of where it is actually hosted would be a step in the right
>> direction.  Here is the "official" feedback I received that doesn't
>> address this particular issue (it was later determined that most of
>> this was formatting/layout/availability).
>
> We're talking about Google here-- perhaps a Google spreadsheet is more
> appropriate for the tabular data than a wiki?  Then you can take
> advantage of forms (a feature for accepting new row entries),
> publishing as HTML and other formats, RSS feeds, concurrent editing,
> etc.

The whole point is that the data isn't actually tabular.  Each project
should have a title, an extensive description, references to external
sources (this is a big one we were missing) as well as information
about potential mentors, length of project, etc.  If anything it would
be better served as a Document instead of a Spreadheet, but then you
run into a number of issues with consistent look/templates as well as
linking/listing the available projects.

Anything will be an improvement over the flat cumbersome list that we
produced last year.  Yuri makes a good point in that the list doesn't
need to apply specifically to GSoC, but could instead be used for our
own coding bounty listing.  Perhaps one of the other commercial Lua
users would be interested in helping to fund some projects at some
point in the future as well!

- Jim


- Jim