Re: who's familiar with the GSOC application process

On 23.03.2012 22:30, Dave Cramer wrote:
> Someone has approached the JDBC list to do some work on the driver as
> a GSOC project.
>
> I need to know what is involved in mentoring and how to get the
> project approved

The mentor's job is to keep regularly in touch with the student, to
ensure that he's on the right track. It's not about code review or
things like that, but making sure that the student is posting to the
right mailing list, frequently enough. Some students need more prodding
than others. Some years, I've had to do practically nothing as my
students have been hacking away and posting updated patches to the
mailing list like an old-timer. And sometimes, the student needs a lot
of hand-holding to make a post, and explanation what it means when they
get contradictory feedback from different community members. See also:
https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2012/faqs#time_mentor.
If you're willing to mentor, click the button at
https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2012/postgresql
(although there's no hurry to do that if you're unsure, I believe
mentors can be added later, too, after students have submitted proposals).

To get a project approved, the student needs to a submit a proposal
through the GSoC website (it's not open for student proposals yet). All
the mentors review all the proposals and discuss them among each other
and with the students, until the mentors reach a consensus on a ranking
of the proposals, and who's willing to mentor which proposal. Google
then assigns "slots" to the 2-3 top projects (the number of slots each
organization gets isn't known in advance), and those proposals are accepted.

So from a practical point of view, what the students should be doing
right now is to discuss their ideas on the usual project mailing lists,
like you would discuss any proposal regardless of GSoC.

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com