[Kde-games-devel] GSoC 2010

[Mauricio Piacentini]

Well, I think that Mancala at least produced the intended results (a
working game). As for Parsek I am really not up to date with it: what
has happened so far?

I don't know really, but maybe the "problem" is that we are not
choosing the best people to work with kdegames. We could try a
different approach, at least with one or two slots this time: what
about choosing a student that HAS ALREADY contributed something to the
community, someone that has been around in IRC, kdebugs or in the
mailing list? One of the goals of SoC is to get new contributors, but
it is also ok for students that are already part of the community to
submit an applications, as long as the work that they are going to do
is new. Perusing the 2009 list I can see some examples of this
approach, with projects from Chani, Sandro, Sascha, Martin and others.
These people were already contributing to KDE, and used the SoC time
and resources to go deeper into a specific project that otherwise
would not be done (as the authors would have to find a different
source of income or pick a different job unrelated to KDE for the
duration of the summer.)

Looking at it from a different angle, it seems clear that some people
only propose ideas to get the money. Nothing wrong with that, but it
is naive of us to expect that these people will stick around for
free... Some even do, but the initial motivation is gone, so it is
natural that they go away when the season is over. It might be better
to draft at least some projects from our pool of interested
contributors, people that have shown interest in the project already,
and might use a chance to dedicate more time to an area of it.

It might be an interesting idea, to see what happens. In any event, I
think we should try to get at least one slot, but only if there are
really interesting people proposing, and we feel that the student will
really stick around. Otherwise we should let our slot go, imo.

Regards,
Mauricio Piacentini

--

Disclaimer: after writing this I got the idea of a project to propose
as part of my master thesis, so maybe you will see a GSoC proposal
from me. It will not be related to KDE Games, however.