Google Summer of Code 2009 application

For the 2010 application, go to the Google Summer of Code 2010 application page.

This year, we're trying something different. 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 9, and earlier is better.

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

What criteria do you use to select the members of your group? Please be as specific as possible.
A: Administrators must have past mentoring experience, and at least one administrator must have past experience as an administrator. Last year's admin, Alec Warner (Google), will be backup admin. 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.

Has your group participated previously? If so, please summarize your involvement and any past successes and failures.
A: Yes. Gentoo has an excellent track record for project success. Last year was particularly good, with 5 of our 6 students succeeding. One of those students recently joined Gentoo as a full-fledged developer (Nirbheek Chauhan) and is actively working on bringing his project to a full release, another remains active in the community (Eric Thibodeau) and is fairly likely to become a developer, and a third continued work on his project through at least the end of 2008 (Nandeep Mali).

Over the history of Gentoo's involvement in the Summer of Code, we have a 45% success rate in passing students becoming developers at some point and a 68% success rate in passing students becoming community members who are still active today.

What questions/requests do we want in our application template for students, in addition to the GSoC application?
A: We should have a couple of requirements. One is that people can check out the code of the project they propose to work on and make a small edit. Another is that people must get involved in the community by joining an IRC channel and talking to someone as well as posting to a mailing list.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
A: 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.

(antarus): I think the daily attempts thing is a bit crazy; I don't think our mentors will follow this policy and god knows if I was a student I'd hate it and I'd just not apply to work on Gentoo projects. Be realistic, getting in touch once or twice a week is probably sufficient. Mentors and students should be meeting that often anyway to discuss progress, blockers, and needs for the project. If a student misses a meeting; I agree email/phone are good methods to find out why. If they miss 2 meetings in a row (2 weeks) then there is a high likelihood that the student is gone for good and we should be ready to fail them for that.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
A: 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 contributors to interact with your community before, during, and after the program?
A: 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 contributors stick with the project after the program concludes?
A: 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 last year's mentor summit was trying to transition students into developers before the summer ends, to create a natural continuation instead of a break.