This summer’s WordPress GSoC/Gnome OPW interns span a number of contributor groups. Rather than create a standalone blog for all the students as we have in the past, this year we’ll be trying something different, as our community structure has changed since our last round. Each intern will post their detailed weekly updates on the team blog for the contributor group with which their project most naturally aligns, while posting about administrative things will happen here on the community team site.

Just to remind everyone, these are the interns for this summer who’ll be popping up around town (so to speak):

• Ryan McCue, from Australia, working on a JSON-based REST API. Mentors will be Bryan Petty and Eric Mann.
• Kat Hagan, from the United States, working on a Post by Email plugin to replace the core function. Mentors will be Justin Shreve and George Stephanis.
• Siobhan Bamber, from Wales, working on a support (forums, training, documentation) internship. Mentors will be Mika Epstein and Hanni Ross.
• Frederick Ding, from the United States, working on improving portability. Mentors will be Andrew Nacin and Mike Schroder.
• Sayak Sakar, from India, working on porting WordPress for WebOS to Firefox OS. Mentor will be Eric Johnson.
• Alex Höreth, from Germany, working on  adding WordPress native revisions to the theme and plugin code editors. Mentors will be Dominik Schilling and Aaron Campbell.
• Mert Yazicioglu, from Turkey, working on ways to improve our community profiles at profiles.wordpress.org. Mentors will be Scott Reilly and Boone Gorges.
• Daniele Maio, from Italy, working on a native WordPress app for Blackberry 10. Mentor will be Danilo Ercoli.

First things first: every student and mentor on this list needs to click the button in the upper right sidebar to subscribe to this blog.
All announcements, deadline reminders, etc will happen here, and saying “I forgot to check the blog, I didn’t know about it,” is a good way to end up in a bad position. Why not subscribe right now before you keep reading?

Subscribed? Good.

Tools

Each coding intern will get an SVN repo for their code. You are required to use this repo, not github or other source control system, as it is the platform used by WordPress, and part of summer of code is about getting students contributing to the project using the same tools used by core developers. You will have commit rights to your repo, and your wordpress.org username/password will serve as login credentials. We’ve also set up a Trac instance for the projects, and each project will be listed as a component. Again, this is the system WordPress core uses, so it is mandatory to use Trac over another issue tracking system. You can use multiple systems (git +svn) as long as your svn is always up to date. @nacin has already set up coding intern access to these tools at gsoc.svn.wordpress.org and gsoc.trac.wordpress.org.

Schedule

We will be creating a schedule of who is required to post their weekly updates on which day. Your posts should outline what you accomplished/worked on in the past week, and state what you will be working on in the coming week. Please use “weekly update” as a tag on these posts, as well as the tag that we’ll give you that’s specific to your project. The scheduled days will be staggered so that everyone’s updates don’t all come in at once. If the day you get assigned is a problem due to work or school commitments, please let us know asap so we can swap your day. You also may post with smaller updates, questions, or requests for feedback as often as you like.

Mentors will leave feedback on your posts, but so will other interns and community members. Be gracious in taking feedback, but also remember that there are a lot of opinions out there. Don’t change course based on a random comment — talk things over with your mentors if a commenter has you rethinking things.

The weekly update is for the community, not just your mentors. You should be checking in with your mentors at least that often; it is up to you and them to decide how often to be in touch and in what form (email, irc, skype, etc). Mentor time is valuable and in most cases volunteer, so staying on schedule with your communications is important out of respect for your mentors. If you go more than a week without posting your update and/or touching base with your mentor, you will get a warning. If you go more than two weeks, you will be put on probation. If you are absent for three weeks, you will fail. Once the coding period begins, each weekly check-in should include a code review. If you are not showing code, you will not be considered to be meeting the goals of the project.

Getting Started

You should make contact with your mentors right away to discuss your scope and timetable. You have about a week to haggle over details. A revised scope and schedule need to be posted and confirmed by Friday. We’ll be reaching out to each intern about creating a page for this blog with their final project scope and schedule this week. Mentors will comment on the page when the description, scope and timeline are approved. If you do not contact your mentors this week to get the ball rolling, you could miss one of your first deadlines — don’t let that happen!

The other assignment for this week is to write an introduction post for your contributor group’s blog so people will know who you are. This post should contain a brief intro to who you are and your project. You can start working on this post now, and we’ll let you know where to post it when we set up our chat for this week.

Role of Mentors

With the exception of the mobile projects, each student has more than one mentor to provide support over the course of the summer and to ensure that busy work schedules, vacations, or family emergencies don’t leave the student without guidance. The first name listed for each student is the primary mentor, who will be responsible for the evaluations at midterm and final. In addition, there are a handful of approved mentors who did not take an a full-time intern, who will provide additional code review and feedback to a specific project, as determined with the official mentors.

Your mentors are guides, not instructors. These projects are *your* babies, not theirs. Mentors are there to evaluate code, give feedback on proposed approaches, and point you in the direction of a helpful resource if you’ve exhausted all the possibilities you can think of and still can’t find the information you need. Mentors are not there to answer questions you could answer by using Google, to make decisions for you, or to write example code to show you how things should be done. When we chose you as a student, it was in part because we thought you would be able to take the proper initiative. We’re counting on you to prove us right. If you ask for too much hand-holding, it will call your abilities into question, so when you do ask for help (and we know everyone will need help now and then) be sure to outline what steps you have already taken to try and solve your problem/answer your question so that the mentors can see what you’ve already tried and won’t think you’re asking them instead of trying to figure it out yourself first.

Role of Administrators

Andrea Middleton and I will be the program administrators. If you have any problems with your mentors, please talk to the mentors directly  to try and resolve it first, but if you are unable to reach someone, or are having a bad experience with someone, get in touch with me or Andrea and we will help you work it out. If you have trouble accessing the system tools, let us know so we can get you some help. We are here to provide general support, but hopefully everything will run smoothly and you will barely know we exist. If all goes well, the next time we talk to you will be when we start scheduling IRC chats for you to show off your projects to the community at midterm.

Congratulations again to all the accepted students! We are very excited to work with you, and look forward to a summer full of interesting projects.

Gnome Outreach Program for Women (OPW) is a little less formal since all communication happens through email instead of through an application like GSoC uses (melange). 10 women sent in applications, of which there a few strong candidates in the areas of code, support, and documentation. There are also some women who contacted us through the form on this site asking for more specifics about projects, mentors, and how to make a contribution. Have been replying to them telling them they can still apply as long as it is before our decision deadline (May 8), so will be accepting applications from those folks for another day, and they’ll have until May 17th to make their sample contribution to the project before we make the selection decisions. If possible, I’d like to be able to take on at least 3 interns from the OPW program.

Automattic has offered to sponsor the first intern, so I’m hoping for community support to cover the extra cost. 3 interns will cost $17,250 ($5,750 per intern), so any WordPress-based businesses willing to help offset some of this cost would be much-lauded. If you’re interested in helping with financial sponsorship, you can send a message using the Ask a Question form, or you can ping me on irc/skype/email if you already have that contact info. Every little bit helps!

Note: GSoC’s application period lasts until May 3.

I submitted the WordPress application to participate in GSoC on March 29th, the deadline for applying. The mobile team helpfully added a bunch of project ideas, but core team has been so focused on 3.6 that that area hasn’t gotten much attention, so I don’t know if we’ll be accepted or not. I left in the (not yet done) ideas and mentors from a past year so that we wouldn’t look empty, but I would have liked more new projects to get in there. Will be trying to get some core peeps to help round it out today at WC Miami, and will shoot Carol at GSoC an email to let her know we’ve added more stuff (since they finished reviewing applications yesterday, and are announcing accepted orgs on Monday).

If we are accepted I’ll be looking for 2 people to project manage the program for the season. Will talk to a couple of likely people at WC Miami about that today as well.

Gnome Outreach Program for Women

I applied for WordPress to be a mentoring organization for the Gnome program, and we have been accepted. Some good things and some less than good things about this one.

Good Things:

• Not limited to just code. We could take on interns in design, support, translation, documentation, community management, you name it. And code, of course. Much more leeway in the effort to grow the ranks of women project contributors. How awesome would it be for a budding/potential support team member to be officially mentored by @ipstenu or @andrea_r? To have a design intern that could help with all the Make site stuff? To have a pm or org management type get involved with the day to day minutiae of managing our contributor community, much of which goes undone because I and many other people all run out of time for lower-priority administrative tasks? To do plugin reviews? To work on some of the international things suggested by Cátia and Zé? Helping with WC and Meetup approvals? We have so many community jobs that don’t get the same level of attention as core contribution, and this would really put a spotlight on some of those areas.
• It’s a small program, communication has been very easy and low-stress so far, and the women overseeing it are readily accessible.
• Students get a stipend of around 5k for the summer, so they can work full-time on the projects.

Less Good Things (well, not less good, but less easy):

• Unlike GSoC, which is funded by Google so all we have to contribute is our time as mentors and admins, the Gnome program will require us to fundraise in order to cover costs. We need to cover at least one intern, and from there it seems to depend on how the general fundraising goes. Basically thinking now’s the time to start a fundraising effort aimed squarely at growing contributor diversity, to cover Gnome program, trainings, etc.
• We don’t have a list from a previous year of undone things that we can swipe. Well, we do and we don’t. Code projects can be swiped from there, but we need to come up with a list of mentors and project ideas for the non-code stuff tout de suite. Will try to get some people together at WC Miami to help with this also, but comments on this post from anyone with a project idea and/or willing to be a potential mentor for the summer would be great.

Anyway, on Monday we’ll know about GSoC, so we can make an announcement about both programs together. Will also be announcing some plans for WordPress’s 10th anniversary early this coming week.

This is probably one of the easiest ways to actually start contributing if you’d like to start helping out anywhere. Familiarity of the contribution process is needed, but programming knowledge is not.

See the schedule here https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ap7kF4dij-8ddDY2d1laWFRQR1BfWDRhbmtDMmhrOEE#gid=2

And our original post here http://make.wordpress.org/community/2013/01/29/im-pinch-hitting-for-andrea-r-so-we/