coapp-developers team mailing list archive

[Andreas Schiffler <aschiffler@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I can't speak to the administrative hassles - but I've done GSoC 
mentoring for the last two years for the Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) 
project. It is rewarding and fun from a mentoring perspective and the 
only "paperwork" I had to do as mentor was to (1) create proposal, (2) 
report on student progress twice, and (3) submit receipts for the mentor 
summit travel to the project admin. During the project, I spend about 
2-4h a week per student on communications, technical support and program 
management. Time commitment is a bit more during "retro-weeks" or at the 
beginning and end of the project.

GSoC definitely has the benefits you list below for a project. While one 
of the ideas for GSoC is to bring in fresh folks into FOSS projects and 
make them long-term contributors, this may or may not work. My students 
didn't "stick" with SDL, but in each case some good work got done that 
lives on in the source code. Another secondary effect is the fact, that 
up to 2 mentors get to go to the GSoC mentor summit. There one can 
mix&mingle with others, promote ones project, learn what is going on in 
OSS, etc. - such interactions can definitely lead to new synergies and 
expanded efforts. The key in my view is to have some well-rounded and 
clear project proposals, one or more backup mentor(s) for technical 
questions, and sufficient scale (i.e. several projects/students/mentors) 
so an individual failure - which may happen - doesn't affect the spirit 
and overall outcome of GSoC participation.

For what's its worth: I'd be interested to do GSoC mentoring again.

--Andreas

On 2/4/12 1:00 PM, Eric Schultz wrote:
> I know last year there was an interest for CoApp to apply to Google 
> Summer of Code but it didn't coalesce into an application. Google just 
> announced that Summer of Code is returning again this year and I would 
> love for us to become a mentoring organization. CoApp would receive 
> recognition from the OSS community as a whole, free student help for 
> the summer and possible long term committers (and we'd get on Google's 
> OSS radar which is always good). That said, it would lead to a 
> significant amount of work on the part of Garrett likely and whoever 
> the actual student mentors are. (I'd be happy to volunteer as a 
> student mentor.)
>
> Another possibility would be for Outercurve to become a mentoring 
> organization like the Apache Software Foundation and the Python 
> Software Foundation. This might lead to fewer students going to CoApp 
> but eliminates much of Garrett's administrative work, something we all 
> know he'd like to avoid. :) Outercurve might have a stronger 
> application than CoApp by itself; I really don't know.
>
> All of this said, it leads me to a few questions that we should 
> probably discuss:
>
> 1. Should CoApp apply as a mentoring organization for GSoC? Are the 
> administrative hassles worth it?
>
> 2. Should Outercurve apply as a mentoring organization instead? Does 
> the Outercurve staff has sufficient time to manage the administrative 
> tasks?
>
> 3. What projects does CoApp have that would work well for a summer 
> project for a college student?
>
> Any thoughts on any of this?
>
> Eric
>
>
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