[wp-hackers] [GSoC] Document Management

[Mike Schinkel]

On Mar 30, 2011, at 9:51 PM, Jane Wells wrote:
> Mike - These are student projects, intended as learning and mentorship opportunites within the open source project. The majority don't wind up in core or being what they were imagined to be during the application phase. Let's not attempt to put the same burden you would place on someone applying for a contract development job on the teenage and early-20s students who make up the majority of GSoC applicants. The project mentors are the ones providing the real-world experience as they work with the students during the warm-up period to revise scope as needed. That's kind of the whole point of pairing up students and mentors in GSoC.

But this projects have a significant opportunity cost, and if one fails to gain traction after implements it keeps one that could have been a  huge success from happening

So my concern with his proposal was that it would be incredibly valuable, probably the best I've seen, but only if done right.  If done without a good understanding of use-cases then it could be done poorly and then my fear would be it could become used widely (like NextGen is) but do a poor job of addressing important use cases and thus act like a blocker for those use-cases (again, like NextGen, although NextGen could easily fix the problems I've seen that it has.)  Frankly, I have clients who want some of the exact things his proposal specified.

Further my belief is that no one single mentor, myself included, could offer him enough experience to do a good job on the entirety of his proposal; its scope is just too large. I guess my point of asking for experience is to shine a light on the need for lots of experience for a project of that magnitude. If he instead takes on just one component of his proposal then I think he might be able to do a great job.

> Ben - I love the doc management idea. Check out the EditFlow plugin for one approach to workflow management. Yes, you will likely need to focus on a subset of the functionality you mentioned giving the timing of the term, but that is certainly doable.

Exactly.

-Mike