Post-mid-term changes

First of all, I want to thank all the students and mentors who have worked hard to make this GSoC successful.

The mid-term evaluations are over, and there are both good and bad news and some important changes on how we are going to work from now on.

The good news: some projects have made amazing progress and are well underway to archive their main goals, congratulations to everyone who got this far.

The bad news: many projects are way behind schedule, and what is worse, due to lack of open communication it is impossible to estimate what their exact status is and what changes need to be made to bring them back on track.

During the first half of GSoC everyone got a free hand to organize their projects in any way they wanted, no requirements were made and there was no control of how projects were going.

It was probably naive to assume things would work out fine this way, but it probably was a lesson we needed to learn.

Starting next week every project should at least follow this basic requirements:

• Students should post to their blog or in this list at least twice a week with project status updates, including a short summary of what progress has been made and what is next and any problems or issues holding things back.

• All source code should be publicly available, ideally in a mercurial repository in the http://gsoc.cat-v.org/hg/ site.

• All student-mentor communication should occur in public channels, either irc or public mailing lists. If currently no appropriate communication channels for the project exist, a new one should be created (either by creating a new irc channel in freenode or new mailing list in google-groups)

• Mentors should post at least once a week with a short update on how they think the project is progressing.

• If either mentors or students have trouble reaching each other at any point, the plan9-gsoc list or irc channels should be notified immediately of the situation.

• Every project should keep a short list of major goals, and update it with which ones have been accomplished already and which are still pending.

• If at any point the project is behind schedule, a plan to get it back on schedule should be created and published.

• Both students and mentors should subscribe to plan9-gsoc to make announcements like this possible (I have added everyone now, so nobody should need to do anything for this)

If for any reason someone can’t comply with one of this requirements, we will be very understanding, but we need to know why.

Lets hope this improves how things work in the second half of the summer and ensures that all projects are successful.

Best wishes to everyone

the Plan 9 GSoC admin.