[gentoo-dev] Proposal for (next year's probably) SoC

I think it could be useful to learn from other projects' handling of
SoC. The FFmpeg project has a list of "qualification tasks" for the
students to complete before they can accepted into SoC, as you can see
From [1].

The tasks are minor tasks that don't require a lot of time at hand, but
gives a good way to judge if the person is in for the experience or the
money, and might be able to cut the deal even for Gentoo devs if that is
really wanted.

How to implement it for Gentoo? Well I think we have the tool already:
Bugzilla. We just need to add a keyword SOC_QUALIFICATION_TASK; when a
developer think of a working qualification task, he can add the keyword
and CC the soc team or something like that.

Then the users can deal with the problems whenever they want, for the
next SoC, even during the year. When they submit their application, we
ask users to put the link to the bug that represented the qualification
task they completed.

To make the checking more easy, we could make sure that the person who
completed the task is listed in the Whiteboard, and that only Gentoo
devs can change that for the bugs for qualification task (letting only
devs opening them, or cloning the feature requests from user that become
a SoC qualification task, for instance).

Then get a tracker that is blocked by all the SoC qualification task
bugs, monitored by the SoC team, that can make sure how stuff is going
with the qualification tasks, and finally add a default query for the
tasks to the documentation about SoC.

I'm sure we can easily get some qualification tasks on; with a bit more
work we might also get qualification points (so that for instance minor
tasks alone can't cut the deal).

Maybe a bit complex, but I think it might be worth discussing.

[1] http://wiki.multimedia.cx/index.php?title=FFmpeg_Summer_Of_Code_2008

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò
http://blog.flameeyes.eu/