Hi, sending summary of investigation of possibility to collaborate with universities... How can we collaborate: - universities have many students that needs to do some semesters works, write bachelors thesis, master thesis, phd thesis and such. - it's hard for teachers to come up with topics for students - we've got many interesting stuff to do, but we don't have enough manpower - so we can join our efforts: - universities will provide students - we will provide idea and mentor - some teacher/person on the university side will take care administrative part and thesis writing - our mentor will take care of technical part What would be needed to start it in large scope: - have a list of topics and mentors universities and students can choose from - show requirements - how hard it is - detailed description - whether somebody already tried that - whether the topic is taken - relevant references - mentor, co-mentor - have a list of mentors - finished/unfinished/wip topics - history of mentorship - some possible evaluation from students/universities Universities needs mentors they can rely on that wouldn't disappear faster then a student and mentors that can take care of the student. Workflow I can imagine... Student needs to write thesis. Teacher needs a topic for him. One of them will take a look at our topics list. He will search for a topic according to the students skills. They will take a look at mentors references, contact him and pick the topic. Teacher will take care of administrative side of things - registration at university and help with formal aspects. Our mentor will help with all technical aspects and will guide the student. At the end students work will be actually used and good for something. We would get new cool thing done and possibly another open source enthusiast. Student would get interesting thesis topic that is actually good for something. Teacher will have less work with making the student graduate. Everybody wins. <sidenote> I know that RedHat is already providing mentors for the thesis and they are giving talks and helping to teach students stuff. And if they find somebody skilled among the students, they hire him. </sidenote> Apart from that, this might be a good idea for cross-distro collaboration if we would get such a site running, something similar to the Junior Jobs site Jos was sending here some time ago. Obviously the main idea would be to have mentors from community as well. To make it work and to have reliable mentors, we would probably need some filtering and not let anybody be the mentor. Something like invitation only mentors or that new mentor need to finish at least X thesis with some full fledged mentor as co-mentor, so there would be some backup in case of disappearance. I think that mentorship shouldn't be much harder then GSoC mentorship and we have plenty of GSoC projects this year. So this is the idea of what could be our sprint and why it might be a good idea. But sure, we can start without infrastructure and without sprint, just encourage people to prepare projects and topics and contact universities. Feedback, opinions welcome. Obviously it is just an idea, I haven't tried to look for some existing solution that will help with that, might do so in the future. -- Michal HRUSECKY SUSE LINUX, s.r.o openSUSE Boosters Team Lihovarska 1060/12 PGP 0xFED656F6 19000 Praha 9 mhrusecky[at]suse.cz Czech Republic http://michal.hrusecky.net http://www.suse.cz