[Soc-2006-dev] google feedback

[Kent Mein]

Hi Guys,

Google is asking us to send someone there for a day to talk about
SOC and try to improve it both through things Google can do for us,
and possibly if there are ways that we can work with other orgs to
also improve things.

So does anyone have any feedback/ideas they would like us to share
with Google?

Here are a couple of thoughts from my own head to get things started.

Things that really seemed to help this year that we did not do last year.
	Weekly reports from students.
	blenderartist.org links for projects.

I think that separate cvs branches for each project are useful but I also
think that improving that would be on my wish list....  merging with 
current cvs is still a pain in the butt it seems, and most students don't want
to deal with the extra hassle.

I think that the wiki pages for each project were also very useful, however
I think the usefulness of them depended on the students effort put into
them to a large extent.
It might be worth it to make sure the weekly reports are done on their wiki 
pages.

I like the flexibility Google gives us, and I think if they had some sort of
central revision control tree for soc projects, that it would just be more
additional work for students and merging with current cvs would be more of
an issue than it is now.

Admin related:
The voting for determining projects had some issues we were able to work
around them, but it was a pain.
It was nice to have an interaction with the potential students on the submitted proposals.  Its also nice to be able to rank them, however the ranking system was a bit kludgey.  I think it would make more sense to have ability of all
mentors to rank each project on a 1-10 scale.  Then show total points for
each project, with ability to see what each mentor gave as a "score", and
the date they submitted it.

Potential issues with this are as things change, some of the mentors might
not upgrade their scores.  With the kludgey system we were able to
vote multiple times so that one person could readjust things to where we 
thought everything should be.   If the system were changed as stated we may
still need the "Admin" to be able to readjust the scores if we have a mentor
that isn't on the ball.

Anyone have anything else to add?

Kent
-- 
mein at cs.umn.edu
http://www.cs.umn.edu/~mein