Gauging interest for a student projects revival

[Paul Brown]

On Thursday, 14 August 2025 17:21:29 Central European Summer Time Kevin Ottens 
wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> On Thursday, 14 August 2025 15:22:23 Central European Summer Time Paul Brown
> wrote:
> > This ties in perfectly with one of the legs of the "KDE Needs You 🫵"
> > goal.
> > 
> > One of the things we are working on is expanding SoK to cover
> > 
> > - the KDE-oriented GSoC like events we currently run
> > - training programs for trainee/junior developers in KDE-friendly
> > companies
> > (we are already talking to KDAB, QT and ICS)
> > - Bespoke programs for NGOs and individuals
> > - "Work experience"-like/end of course/dissertation projects for students
> > <
> > your project would fall under this category
> 
> Note this is very different from GSoC or SoK

Yes, you are right. The *new* extended SoK has many things that are not 
contemplated  by the *old* SoK (which focused on just one thing: GSoC-like 
mentorship programs).

One of new things we are doing is working with academic institutions, such as 
trade schools, universities, colleges, etc. to introduce KDE into their 
curricula 

You can see some of the efforts to do this in the issues collected here:

https://invent.kde.org/teams/goals/contributor-onboarding/-/issues

(Apologies: it is not covered in just one issue. The parts covering some of 
the ideas you forwarded in your original message are scattered over several 
issues. We'll  bring it all together in a handbook at some point).

> which are from the single
> contributor point of view. Here it's a whole team you have to deal with, the
> logistics is quite a bit different.

Yes. We think that is a great idea, despite the challenges. We see it as a 
more natural way to work. Although there a many occasions where a developer 
work on their own, arguably in a professional context one courl argue that it 
would be more common to develop within a team rather than in isolation. We 
want to prepare mentess for that and mentoring projects with this in mind will 
give mentees a whole different set of useful skills.

Opening up SoK to teams is also covered in our list of things we want to 
introduce. You can read about it in the original proposal (https://
phabricator.kde.org/T17439) and in the issues mentioned above.

> > It seems redundant to have two projects working on the same thing, so
> > would
> > you like to join the KNY project?
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by that. To me it's not "the same thing", it goes
> toward the same goals though.

We are doing the same thing in that we are approaching academic institutions 
and seeing how we can adapt to their needs. This adaptation would include 
working within their calendar, mentoring teams, choosing projects that would 
best adapt to what they are learning and their level of knowledge, etc.

It sounds a lot like what the new mentorship project we are building intends 
to do.

> > If so, I'll invite you on Matrix to the room and we can also pursue this
> > further while at Akademy.
> 
> Sure

Okay. On it.

Cheers

Paul
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