As an academic, I’m interested in having students learn and improve themselves. And open source projects are one of the prime ways of doing that. As much as possible, in my university (POLITEHNICA Bucharest), I’m looking into involving students in open source project, via mentoring, extracurricular events, using open source for teaching and research.
We have some level of involvement in the Xen project, with students working on Argo, Stub Domains and documentation. We’re looking to expand that - ideally I could involve 2 students each year. Potentially this model could be replicated in other universities as well.
On a personal level, I’m looking for projects and technical mentors for students (such as Andrew, Marek, Denis and Jason have been doing). But largely, I think it would be good to discuss what are potential ways to increase / improve student involvement in the Xen community and getting them to be constant contributors.