Organizing Tips

Organizing Tips

Advertising Poster
:
 If someone can design a poster for OpenSolaris as a participating organization of Google Summer of Code, which can go on the noticeboards of Graduate Colleges across the world, it would be great!
 Gnome had done the same last year. (see here)

Closed IRC Status Report Meetings (We need a good name for this)
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 A Bi-Weekly IRC Meeting with all the students and mentors involved. This should be done on an exclusive IRC channel, like say, #OSol-soc and all selected students and mentors should be present. The agenda of such sessions should be status reports and technical discussions on the road ahead. It will also help reduce the burden of every mentor, as now he is not the only link between the student and the community.
 Students should be encouraged to help each other. This will not only help students get their initial queries cleared, but also help in making critical decisions later on. Plus, it helps if the students are aware of what the other students are working on.

Ship the latest Media
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 The latest development release DVD should be shipped to the selected students as soon as possible. The student must be directed to learn about relevant projects from the community that might help his particular project (like DTrace, or say something more specific, like Crossbow)
 The student must be encouraged to stay bleeding edge, i.e. Update their code base from the OSol repository periodically. The students should understand the value of version control systems before they begin their project.

Involve Local Usergroups
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 The Usergroups page shows that there are 59 recognized usergroups in all. If the student belongs to one of those areas, he *should* become a part of the local group as well. It helps the student understand the community in general.

Could we promise free T-Shirts to successful students?
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 Many students who are repeat participants year after year look for extra value, now that they have the exposure. Last year some of the organisations had promised swag that helped them get a large chunk out of this crowd. Could we not offer something cool in the same manner? We are allowed to advertize such offerings on our SoC Ideas page, Google didnot object it last year. It will attract better students, no doubt.