GSoC 2014

It’s that time of year again, when all good* coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. developers start thinking about whether or not they’re up for mentoring a GSoC student this year. Many in this group know the drill, but there quite a few involved core contribs active this cycle who haven’t been involved with GSoC before, so here’s the deal:

  • Google pays for a program that gives college students summer jobs creating open sourceOpen Source Open Source denotes software for which the original source code is made freely available and may be redistributed and modified. Open Source **must be** delivered via a licensing model, see GPL. code under the mentorship of an organization (like WordPress).
  • We apply to be a mentoring organization and put up a list with a bunch of potential summer project ideas and identify who the mentors might be.
  • If we’re chosen to participate, we get a certain number of slots to fill, and students submit applications to work with us.
  • All the potential mentors rate/rank the proposals, and decide if there’s someone they’d like to mentor.
  • In game of chance-meets-requests dizzy enough to rival medical school matches, we put together our wish list for mentor-student matchups. 2 mentors per student, to provide coverage and make things more collaborative.
  • We hope that none of our top picks also applied to other orgs who accepted them, and wind up with our student roster.
  • We provide volunteer mentors to work one-on-one with the kids on projects that they applied to do over a 3-month period.
  • Open source code is released into the wild.

I’ll be putting together our application to be a mentoring organization this week, so it’s time to start thinking of project ideas we could suggest on the Ideas page that we need for the application (the more ideas the better) and who wants to be a mentor. The application deadline is February 14, so I’d like to get the Ideas list in solid shape (along with mentor bios) by Feb 10 (a week from Monday).

If you have an idea or are interested in being a mentor, please leave a comment on this post. At the end of the dev chat after 3.9 business is out of the way, we can discuss some of the ideas and I can answer any questions people have about mentoring.

Related: I’m also going to be posting soon about starting up a regular mentorship program, as outlined here. But that can wait for another day.

*Where good means both skilled and kind and generous with their time.

#gsoc, #mentorship