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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