Re: GNU IceCat & SoC

[James Youngman]

On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 12:49 PM, Giuseppe Scrivano <address@hidden> wrote:
> Hello,
>
>  For GNU IceCat I have two ideas:
>
>  1) Privacy features:
>  *  Investigate new cases and implement them.
>  *  Leave in the low level code only the observers and re-implement the
>    rest as an extension.
>
>  2) Port GNU IceCat to Firefox 3:
>  *  Update IceCat source code to Mozilla Firefox 3.
>  *  Update the plugins list, create .xpi packages where it is needed.
>
>
>  I can be mentor for them.

Thanks for your suggestions!

The second suggestion seems well-defined, but the first one (privacy
features) is very open-ended.  That in itself is fine, but very often
students just choose an idea and volunteer to do it.   They assume
that because the idea is on the suggestions page, the idea itself is
acceptable.  However, my own assumption is that a SOC proposal which
just repeated the text of the suggestion would be rejected as being
too vague.    So, we must expect the student to expand the suggestion
into a more detailed proposal.

Could you please update your suggestion to make that more explicit?
That is, I'd prefer the suggestion to tell the student that their
proposal needs to specify in more detail what they propose to do.

If the suggestions also included pointers to more information
(information the student could read in order to figure out what the
project might entail, for example) that would be good, too.     The
student's proposal would need to include answers to these kinds of
questions:

1. What will the output of your project be?   What things will be
improved/created?
2. How will you know when you're done?
3. What will the project look like at the half-way evaluation point?
4. Of the skills you need to complete the project, which do you
already have and which will you need to learn?

Obviously, I'm not suggesting that we must hand that info to students
on a plate, but I think it would be useful for the suggestion to
provide a little help.  I believe that the quality of the proposals we
get will improve if we set out clear suggestions.

Thanks,
James.