Re: [boost] [gsoc][gsoc19] Communication between students and mentors

Subject: Re: [boost] [gsoc][gsoc19] Communication between students and mentors
From: Mateusz Loskot (mateusz_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-04-02 18:31:42

On Tue, 2 Apr 2019 at 20:17, Damian Vicino <damian_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>
> I encourage students to talk in the list and ask questions when needing help in place of take it to the mentor all the time.
> However, I don't think there should be reports or stuff like that in the dev-list. It makes sense in other orgs like python where
> they have way more students and mentors than us and they had a lot of disappearing mentors in the past, or for orgs where
> those kind of reports are common for the community, not a special thing for students.
> We have a gsoc-mentors email list for discussing problems and ideas while the gsoc progresses.
> Are you trying to fix some problem we had in the past that I do not know about?

I'm not trying to fix any problem.

I'm asking quite an obvious question that I'd expect to appear to anyone,
mentor and student, who aims to participate in Boost GSoC for the first
time and does not find it covered by any guidelines. (Recall number of
students was asking for mentors' e-mails, that indicates lack of guideline.)

I have mentored in GSoC the past but for different organization
where one of key recommendations was to keep all communication public
and transparent and avoid any private student-mentor communication.
That is also to introduce students to collaborative environment,
to participation in a community, etc. I'd like to see that in Boost.

I am considering to mentor for Boost.GIL and I'd like to encourage students
to communicate via public channels, but I'd like to avoid flooding the general
Boost developers' mailing list at the same time. Luckily, GIL specifically
has got space where this can be achieved, https://lists.boost.org/boost-gil/

Best regards,
-- 
Mateusz Loskot, http://mateusz.loskot.net