GSoC 2016: applications open, deadline = Fri, 19/2

[Matthieu Moy <Matthieu.Moy@grenoble-inp.fr>]

Hi,

The GSoC (Google Summer of Code) application for mentoring organizations
is now open. The deadline is Friday, February 19 at 19:00 UTC. That is:
very soon. New website here: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/. More
info about Git's previous GSoC iterations there:
http://git.github.io/SoC-2015-Microprojects/,
http://git.github.io/SoC-2015-Org-Application/.

I haven't been watching the list very closely the last few weeks, but I
didn't see a discussion on whether we shall participate this year, other
than "Starting on a microproject for GSoC"
(http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/284958).

I think participating is a good thing, but it needs mentors, ie. people
and time. On my side, I'd be happy to give a hand to GSoC, but
unfortunately, I won't have time to properly mentor a student. I can be
co-admin, and can help someone to mentor, but only if this someone
agrees to do most of the work. Yes, I do realize that this sounds like
"we should do it, but someone else should do the work" ;-).

So, the first question is: are there volunteers to be GSoC mentors this
year? For those who never did it: mentoring means giving advices to the
student (partly done during the "microproject" phase in our
organization), participating actively in reviews (possibly doing some
first review iterations off-list to avoid overloading the list). On
overall, the goal is to make sure that some useful code is merged before
the end. It's a very enjoyable experience, it can be done with
reasonable knowledge of Git's codebase and community (no need to be an
old-timer), but it needs time to be done properly (expect to get ~10
iterations of each patch series, and spend hour(s) on each). And you get
a nice tee-shirt to show off with your geek friends.

If we have enough potential mentors, then the next questions are: who's
the admin? Work on the application itself, and on the list of ideas.

Cheers,

-- 
Matthieu Moy
http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/