On 20:34 Sun 27 Feb     , Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Welcome back to this year's edition of the Google Summer of Code 
> (GSoC)!

Gentoo was accepted for our 6th summer in GSoC! Last year, we had 19 
students, which made us one of the largest organizations in GSoC. I'd 
love to see our program grow again this year to become even bigger.

I've updated our Summer of Code website [2] and copied our ideas list 
[3] over from the wiki, which was proving unreliable. Tomorrow I'll work 
on news and blog postings. If you have any suggestions or comments on 
improvements to this year's program, please let me know!



I'm planning to make some small changes to our program based on 
experience from last year and discussions at the mentor summit, and I'll 
describe these changes in the remainder of this email. Please note that 
this isn't cast in stone, but the previous experience of many other 
large organizations suggests these are good ideas.

First, we'll work even harder to keep strong communication going between 
mentors, students, and administrators, since this is critical to a 
successful program for students and the rest of us:
  - Beyond our weekly progress reports from students, we'll begin asking 
    mentors to submit a simple multiple-choice question every week so 
    admins can ensure every project is on track in a scalable way.
  - To make sure nobody fails by surprise and give students an 
    opportunity to catch up, we'll have informal evaluations of the 
    students at 1/4 and 3/4 of the way through the program.

Second, we should make some changes to the application process:
  - We now explicitly state the expectation of GSoC being full-time 
    work, which is common across the entire GSoC program [1]. (For
    students, it's also worth reading the rest of the guide.)
  - Our requirement of a patch submission with a proposal will require
    that students fix real bugs rather than making useless cosmetic 
    changes.

Other changes I'm considering:
  - Delaying the requirements portion of the "application template" 
    until after students have applied. This lowers the initial bar to 
    participation by waiting until students have already gotten
    enthusiastic about the program to ask them to spend a little bit of 
    time on it.

1. http://www.booki.cc/gsocstudentguide/_v/1.0/time-management-for-students/
2. http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/userrel/soc/
3. http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/userrel/soc/ideas.xml

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Admin, Summer of Code
Gentoo Linux
Blog: http://dberkholz.com