Communication & failure

[Thiago Macieira]

Hello all students,

As you are aware, we have finished the student mid-term evaluations. I 
regret to say we had some failures, though thankfully not many. If you 
are affected by this, you will receive a separate email from your mentor 
explaining why he felt he couldn't continue working with you and how you 
can improve your relation in the future.

We tolerated some students being behind the schedule, we tolerated some 
delay in communications. All of this was expected in any real-life 
scenario when we did not know each other at the beginning.

What we did not tolerate was a total communications breakdown. This is a 
proactive program. Mentors aren't supposed to go after you, it's the 
other way around. If you have doubts, talk to them. If you can't 
understand the code, talk to them. If you can't build the code, talk to 
them.

This is the spirit of Open Source and of the KDE community: communication 
& friendship. We talk to each other, we ask (stupid) questions on IRC and 
we cry out when someone breaks our code. We have huge flame-wars on 
mailing lists about the tiniest of the problems, but in the end we come 
out of them in even friendlier terms. This is not something we can teach 
you, though...

When so many students are workinging in the KDE section of GSoC, these 
problems are bound to occur. The majority of students is, however, very 
active and we are proud and appreciative of this. We hope you will 
continue at a good pace in the second half of the Summer of Code as we 
approach KDE4.

-- 
  Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
    PGP/GPG: 0x6EF45358; fingerprint:
    E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C  966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358
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