[CentOS-gsocadmin] Welcome, some business

Wed Mar 11 22:05:31 UTC 2015
Karsten Wade <kwade at redhat.com>

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I've just force subscribed the current list of mentors from the GSoC
ideas page. Welcome! If you are not sure you are going to be a mentor,
please email myself and KB <kbsingh at redhat.com> directly.

This is a private list for administrators and mentors to talk about
students, proposals, and sensitive parts of the GSoC experience.
Sometimes it's talking about how to help a student not fail out,
sometimes worse, sometimes better. For example, some peer mentoring is
better in private but worth sharing within our mentor community, if you
see fit. (For people already on this list, you are welcome to stay and
assist as long as you are willing to keep the confidentiality of the
list contents.)

We've got a few things you all need to do:

* Get an account on the GSoC site, with a completed profile, and connect
to the CentOS Project.
  - https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/connection/pick/google/gsoc2015
  - You'll need to follow the directions to make a 'connection' to the
    project, or let me know your username and Jeff or I can request
    the connection.
* Get wiki edit writes for the /GSoC/2015/ namespace. We will likely
track some of the project details there.
http://wiki.centos.org/Contribute#head-42b3d8e26400a106851a61aebe5c2cca54dd79e5

We've got a mix of experiences around GSoC for mentors. My initial guess
is that the majority of you have not previously been GSoC mentors.
However, you may have watched GSoC from within other projects.

It's worth reading the FAQ, and we'll start working together here and on
the centos-gsoc list for the process we'll use to get started.

https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2015/help_page

In the mentoring process there are often other experienced mentors who
review proposals, work with students and mentors, and help overall with
the project, all without being tied to one student and project. As an
example, Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, has helped on all the Fedora GSoC
experiences as a reviewer and refiner of student applications. If you
know of anyone who have been GSoC mentors or admins, feel free to ask
them to help us work through the student application process.

Overall, our goals are (in this order):

1. Make the students successful contributors.
2. Help the project bring new, focused contributors on board.
3. Get something interesting completed.

So while our list of ideas is initially focused on #3, it's really about
adjusting our expectations to what a student can accomplish. It has to
include the communication (email, IRC, blogging), communicating and
working with people across the project (upstream, downstream), and
coding of course.

As we're doing all this, one of the areas that benefits the Project the
most is #2 -- we get better at bringing in new contributors. This is a
benefit all the organizations I've talked with over the years have
identified as a key value from at least the first several years in the
program.

Kind regards,

- - Karsten
- -- 
Karsten 'quaid' Wade        .^\          CentOS Doer of Stuff
http://TheOpenSourceWay.org    \  http://community.redhat.com
@quaid (identi.ca/twitter/IRC)  \v'             gpg: AD0E0C41

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