CFC (Code for Credit)

I am currently working on an Adium plugin and I am on their dev email list so I folllow happenings from time to time. Apparently there was a chat api called ChatKit which was started and seemed like and was a really good thing but died due to lack of manpower. Check out Chatkit dies for the full story.

I know lots of students applied for GSoC (Google Summer of Code). According to the home page " We accepted over 900 student applicants from a pool of nearly 6,200 applications." Certainly some of those students wouldn't mind contributing open source code as part of their semester's work.

This has led to my CFC idea. The idea is simple. Find a professor willing to oversee the course, pick an open source mentor (if you are lucky he will be the same as the prof), come up with a draft proposal with timeline and deliverables etc. GSoC style and pass all this by your CS department or Dean or whoever is in charge of making sure that you get credit for your work.

It will be a great experience builder and hopefully you'll learn a lot about "real world" programming. Doing this just before or just after a Software Engineering course would be especially helpful. I think I'll start a facebook group and invite some people to see how much interest exists then from there ... we'll see what happens.