Google Summer of Code 2011

[James E Keenan]

Friends,

I would like to schedule some time at #parrotsketch on Tuesday,  
February 15 to discuss the Parrot project's participation in the 2010  
Google Summer of Code.

I welcome a relatively open-ended discussion of questions such as:

* "What type of projects should we encourage GSOC students to take on?"
* "Why we should try to have GSOC students work on projects that can  
be merged into Parrot before GSOC ends."

However, there is one narrower, organizational question that needs  
some discussion:  Should the Parrot Foundation participate jointly in  
GSOC with the Perl Foundation, as it has in previous years?  Or  
should we participate separately?

Let me emphasize right here that I'm not proposing this as "yet  
another step in differentiating ourselves from Perl."  My concern is  
much more practical than that.

Any open source project that participates in GSOC needs a project  
director to serve as liaison to Google, GSOC students and GSOC  
mentors.  The workload on the project director is considerable and  
entails travel to Google offices to participate in planning.

Jonathan Leto has served as project director for both Parrot  
Foundation and Perl Foundation for several years -- and served very  
well!  But I think the workload in organizing both Parrot and Perl  
projects has now grown to the point where each organization should  
have its own GSOC project director.  Jonathan serves as our Community  
Manager and as a member of the Parrot Foundation Board of Directors  
-- and that's on top of contributing to Parrot itself and to  
PLParrot!  So I would like Jonathan to serve as Parrot's rep to GSOC  
this year (but with a team of assistants and project mentors -- start  
volunteering now), and ask Perl Foundation to recruit their own  
project director.

I would like to get our developers' consensus on this because we will  
have to approach Perl Foundation about this.  Hence, I'm pre- 
scheduling a request for time at this week's online meeing.

Thank you very much.

Jim Keenan
(President, Parrot Foundation)