Google Summer of Code 2010 application

Our organization application is here on the Gentoo wiki, in hopes that we can work together to improve it over the next week. Applications are due starting March 8, and earlier is better.

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating?
We intend to end the summer with new, enthusiastic, experienced, high-quality Gentoo developers.

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
Yes -- Gentoo has an excellent track record for project success. Last year was particularly good, with 6 of our 7 students succeeding. Thanks in part to our new recruitment strategy, three of those students joined Gentoo as full-fledged developers (Mounir Lamouri, Patrice Clement, and Sebastian Pipping). A fourth, Stanislav Ochotnicky, is in the process of becoming a developer right now! We're very excited about this 2/3 recruitment rate and look forward to improving it even more this year.

Over the history of Gentoo's involvement in the Summer of Code, we have a 50% success rate in passing students becoming developers at some point and a 68% success rate in passing students becoming long-term community members.

If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006.
2006: 10/14

2007: 8/9

2008: 5/6

2009: 6/7

== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2010 site. == Congratulations on applying for a project with Gentoo! To improve your chances of succeeding with this project, we want to make sure you're sufficiently prepared to invest a full summer's worth of time on it. In addition to the usual application, there are 2 specific actions and 1 piece of info we would like to see from you:


 * Use the tools that you will use in your project to make changes to code (e.g., source code management [SCM] software such as CVS, Subversion, or git). Please use the same SCM as you will use for your project to check out one of our repositories, make a change to it, and post that change as a patch on a mailing list or bug. You don't necessarily have to fix any real bugs; this is to show that you can use the tools. Your contact in Gentoo can help you determine which SCM and repository you should use for this. If your idea doesn't have a contact, please get in touch with us on the gentoo-soc mailing list or in real-time on IRC at Freenode/#gentoo-soc. Once you've made your change, link to it from your application.
 * Participate in our development community. Please make a post to one of our mailing lists and link to it from your application (archives.gentoo.org holds past postings). The gentoo-soc list would be a good starting point, if you aren't subscribed to any others already.
 * Give us your contact info. Please provide your email address, home mailing address, and phone number. This is a requirement and provides for accountability on both your side and ours.

These actions are things you will do extremely commonly as an open-source developer, and they really aren't that hard, so don't let them hold you back! The remainder of the application is free-form. Please read our application guidelines and Google's FAQ to complete it. Good luck!

What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible:
Project-specific mentors will be selected if they are known as the authority on that project in Gentoo in addition to having the attributes in our mentoring guide. Senior overseeing mentors with previous mentoring experience will also be attached to teach project mentors.

To ensure that mentors can do a great job, we need to also have high-quality project administrators. Admins must have past mentoring experience, and at least one admin must have past experience doing so. This year, both admins will have previous GSoC admin experience. I (Donnie Berkholz) was admin last year and our 2008 admin, Alec Warner (Google), will be backup admin.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
If a scheduled meeting is missed, we will begin daily attempts to reach them through multiple forms of communication. We will require a physical address and phone number, and we will confirm the phone number at the start of the program. If we cannot reach them successfully via these methods, Gentoo's community is large, so we will attempt to have someone near them geographically get in touch. If we cannot get in touch for 1 week without any advance notice from the student, they will be sent a final warning. If we hear nothing by the following day, they will be failed. Students will be informed of this policy when the program starts and will agree to follow it.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
We have available backup mentors so that students will never be without mentorship, even if the original mentor disappears. We will pursue the same communication methods as with students, and failures will be dealt with by blocking them from any future mentoring.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
We will strongly encourage applicants to interact with the community using our standard communication methods (mailing lists and IRC) before and during the application & evaluation periods. In fact, this will be part of our custom application template. If they cannot learn to do it during that month-long period, we can't expect that they will learn to do so during the next few months. That will count against them in the ranking of their application. Since communication will be one of the requirements for a successful application, we expect that problems during and after the program will be much rarer.

We will treat students in the same way we treat other new members of our community, a significant portion of whom are college students just like the applicants. By encouraging students to communicate directly with the community instead of privately with their mentors, we will infuse them with the process of open-source development.

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
In the past, we've discovered that a major key to sticky contributors is close personal ties with the community. Requiring students to become full members of the development community will naturally result in a higher stickiness.

Another technique that we discussed at the 2008 mentor summit was trying to transition students into developers before the summer ends, to create a natural continuation instead of a break.

As my first year as admin last year, we proved these techniques work by increasing our new-developer ratio from 20% to 67%. In 2008, we had 20% become developers but 60% stay involved in the community. In 2009, we successfully converted the community members into developers instead of losing their potential contributions.

Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team?
You all rock! Thanks so much for running a great program for the last few years; we've loved being a part of it.