Re: [Semediawiki-user] Donating to support SMW development

[Dan B. <dan...@gm...>]

On 15 September 2011 23:01, badon <fas...@gm...> wrote:
>

> I did some looking at the Google Summer of Code program. It's $5000 at a
> rate of about $10 per hour, for about 500 hours (3 months) worth of work. I
> figure that if I could put $200 in, that would get 20 hours worth of work,
> and probably some nice improvements, bug fixes, additional features, etc for
> SMW.
>
> I've got no experience in fundraising, but if it were possible to sort of
> extend the Google Summer of Code system, it might be possible to keep
> something like it going almost continuously. If the MediaWiki Foundation can
> handle the financial details, I might be more enthusiastic about donating if
> I were matching donations from other people, up to about $200. If my $200
> could bring out another $200, then that'd give us a full week of dedicated
> programmer effort working on SMW each month.

Reading this again after Yaron's recent reply, I have the following
question, above do you mean that you could donate $200 per month? It
isn't 100% clear.

If so, I think such an initiative could be useful (assuming, as you
say, that at least a few others could also help out).


As Yaron pointed out, there is a lot more to GSoC than just paying
students. Most significantly is the time and effort put in by the
mentors to guide the students into the world of open source software
development. This involves (among other things):

* Educating them about tools and resources:
** To help them work productively and efficiently and
** to help them to educate themselves.

* Educating them about the overall project (i.e. SMW)

* Supporting them in detail on the specific project proposal
** Which files to edit.
** What approach to take.
** What to read, etc.


In the absence of all this experience (freely donated experience
time), 20 or 40 hours a month won't get you very much.


So the question is, can we collectively organize this kind of high
level support as a community?

i.e. by building a wiki where we can post and discuss projects,
suggest time lines and objectives, set payment details, list
resources, and generally be active in supporting would-be developers?
I think such a resource could be useful for MW based GSoC projects too
(unless we could just use the existing Google system? How good is
that?)

I know this is what the smw-dev mailing list is all about, but I
figure any extra development hours would be a + (if managed
correctly).


Cheers,
Dan.