GSoC 2013

It’s time for us to apply for GSoC 2013 if we want to participate. I can take care of the application, but will need everyone’s help in producing the project ideas and mentor sections.

“Why didn’t we get accepted last year?”

We didn’t get accepted last year because our Ideas page wasn’t as good as it had been in past years, and they wanted to make room for some new orgs, so we got cut. Our ideas page wasn’t great because we were planning to embed students in regular cycle feature teams, but we didn’t write up all the potential features this might have included. This year we need to write out all the possible features.

PROJECT IDEAS:

The more project ideas the better, so things that aren’t targeted for the next cycle but that we might want to do as a plugin to get some traction for inclusion in a later release would be great projects, too. Project ideas can include core features, plugins, themes, unit tests, etc. This includes work on .org site things like the plugin used to power WordCamp sites. The projects must be code, though, not design, documentation, etc. List your project ideas in a comment on this post. Please give it a title, and a short one-paragraph description. If there’s a ticket or relevant thread somewhere, link to it.

POTENTIAL MENTORS:

Want to volunteer to be a mentor? You need to be good enough with wp coding that you currently don’t need oversight to generally get it right (though obviously we all can get better with more eyes on code), and have enough time to be available to your student for feedback and code review (at least once per week, though more often is better). The time commitment can be anywhere from one hour to ten hours per week, depending on how far along your student’s project is, and what there is for you to review (an hour or two a week is typical). You get a GSoC tshirt at the end. Want to be a mentor? Leave a comment on this post with a short/one-paragraph little bio about yourself, what kinds of projects you are interested in/qualified to mentor, and links to your website, wordpress.org profile, and twitter account.

LEAD DEVELOPERS:

I know you are right smack dab in trying to get this release out, which is why I’ll take care of the application and associated materials. That said, I’m a bit out of the loop with core plans, so coming up with the potential projects list on my own would mean they might not mesh with the actual goals/plans of core team very well. I’ll be looking to you guys to give me a sense of priority/possible plans for the next dev cycle, and to tell me who is qualified to mentor a project from the final list of volunteers. Will ping you offline for this.

Not sure how to write up a project idea or your short mentor bio? Take a look at the ideas page from 2011 for a guide.

Note 1: This year BuddyPress will be applying as a standalone organization with WP as the vouching organization. I’ll be helping Paul Gibbs get their application going.

Note 2: I haven’t announced it yet since it just happened, but we’ve been accepted as a mentoring organization for the Gnome Outreach Program for Women for the summer session. Unlike GSoC, where Google foots the bill, we’ll have to raise the money to cover our interns for the Gnome program, so I’ll announce it along with a fundraising drive. The Gnome program is a little broader than GSoC, and does allow non-code projects, so things like design, ux, documentation, translation, community management, etc would all be possibilities there.