Re: Google Summer of Code 2009

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Fri, Mar 06, 2009 at 12:52:04PM +0100, Thomas Schwinge wrote:

> I do know that Olaf likes to use them, but what about making these
> texts more formally appealing and remove all (or most of) the smileys?

I can only repeat my petition to disable this idiotic image replacement
-- it indeed makes the smileys look silly.

However, I object to removing the smileys. I put them in for a reason:
liking them has nothing to do with it.

These pages are for the potential students to read. Many of them are new
to free software development, and most of them are rather awed by it. An
overly formal text would only make it worse. Our requirements for the
application are probably intimidating enough without it -- we should do
everything possible to counteract that!

I believe the friendly smileys to have an important psychological
effect: they have the express purpose of making the text less formal and
thus intimidating.

> Olaf, again, I'm not sure if I mentioned this already: I'd offer to
> fulfill the administrator role again.

I don't think you mentioned it yet -- but I'm glad to hear it :-)

How about actually mentoring as well? I don't want to supervise four
students myself again...

(The projects can only really go well if someone is checking the
students' work properly and in a timely manner. I simply don't have the
time and energy to do this alone for so many students. We fared very
poorly in this regard last year: although the students did very good
work on the whole, none of it -- except for some of Andrei's patches --
has been merged into mainline yet. I really hope we can do better this
time...)

-antrik-