We Need GSoC Mentors

It’s time to file our application. Now or never, folks! GSoC applications will be coming in during April, and the active coding/mentorship period would be from May 23 – August 22. To be accepted as a mentor:

  • You must be able to spend a couple of hours per week during the active coding period reviewing student work, answering questions, and general being a source of inspiration.
  • You must have enough patches that have been committed to core for it to be a no-brainer that of course everyone knows you’re going to be super-familiar with core codebase, coding standards, etc.
  • You must be willing to commit a few hours during the student application period (March 28 – April8) to review and rate all incoming student applications. You should plan to save a half day right at the end when we get the last-minute flood of applications.
  • You must be able to attend a couple of IRC chats for potential students to ask questions during the application period.
  • You must do two evaluations of your student, at midterm and at finals. These are largely multiple choice forms. In addition, we’ll want you to post a short progress report now and then (we’ll have a schedule).

In addition to primary mentors who fill all these requirements, we need backup mentors. No one ever has as much time as they’d like to spend with their students, so double- or triple-teaming on the guidance and check-ins will ensure that no student is inadvertently neglected.

Here’s who signed up before:
Westi and Nikolay – unit testing
Aaron Campbell – PHP 5.2+ and MySQL 5 updates and documentation
Paul Gibbs – anything related to BuddyPress
Justin Shreve – any
Pete Mall – multisite anything
Austin Matzko – media, js, menus, rewrite, taxonomies

We should be able to round up at least 10-15 more people, yeah? Please reply to this post if you’re interested, as we need to know how many people will be mentoring to know how many slots we should request. Will update list above as comments come in so there’s one master list.

We’ll put up an ideas page later today and you can also start dropping ideas onto it.