The application period opens today and closes on March 21. Between now and then, we’ll set up a handful of IRCIRC Internet Relay Chat, a network where users can have conversations online. IRC channels are used widely by open source projects, and by WordPress. The primary WordPress channels are #wordpress and #wordpress-dev, on irc.freenode.net. chats starting this Wednesday (We’ll use #wordpress-gsoc so as not to distract from the betaBeta A pre-release of software that is given out to a large group of users to trial under real conditions. Beta versions have gone through alpha testing in-house and are generally fairly close in look, feel and function to the final product; however, design changes often occur as part of the process. work in -dev, and won’t get too close to the dev chat time-wise) to allow some real-time chatting with potential students about their project ideas.

All mentors should sign up for at least one time slot so the students will know which chat time will have appropriate mentors in the room. Everyone is welcome to attend these chats, not just mentors.

I’d like to pick 2 times of day and do the chats on Thursday the 13th, Saturday the 15th, Tuesday the 18th, and Thursday the 20th. 21:00 UTC seems to work well for dev chat, so I’m thinking that could be one of the times, but would like a 2nd time that we could do at least once or twice to make it easier on anyone on Australia/Russia side of the world.

Mentors: Please leave a comment with which days/times you can be available for chats in IRC. If anyone has an idea for a good 2nd chat time, suggestions welcome.

Thanks!

#gsoc, #gsoc2014

I’ve submitted our GSoC application. If anyone is interested in seeing the essay/short-answer questions they ask and how I answered them, I posted that part of the application over at https://make.wordpress.org/community/2014/02/13/gsoc-2014-application/

If you haven’t posted an idea to the codex page https://codex.wordpress.org/GSoC2014 but have time now, go ahead and add it. More ideas = more possible students applying for something that grabs their attention. Also, Google will be reviewing applications Feb 17-21, so adding more ideas (don’t forget to use the template and provide description) between now and the 17th is especially helpful. Not having enough ideas is why we didn’t get accepted in 2012.

Google will announce participating organizations on February 24.

#gsoc, #gsoc2014

Hey all. I created our org profile for GSoC and have started filling out the application. Before I submit it, our ideas page needs to be bursting with project ideas and potential mentors. To that end, if you are interested in mentoring (co-mentoring a specific student, or just being a casual helper-outer in our gsoc channel when the time comes), let’s get you listed and get those project ideas posted.

Go to https://codex.wordpress.org/GSoC2014 and log in to the codex (your wordpress.org u/p). You will see that I’ve made a template for posting project ideas. Just click the Edit link next to Ideas or next to the template labeled “Project Idea (copy this section, paste below…”, and add your idea to the list below the ones that are there. I filled in one for the standard Full-throttle Trac Annihilation idea using the template so there would be at least one example there for the first poster.

Post as many good ideas for projects as you can think of. Make sure they are substantial enough to constitute a full-time summer job for the student, but not so grand that they won’t be able to finish in 3 months. Note that we always require their working prototype by midterm, so really they should be able to do the primary coding in 6 weeks, with the 2nd 6 weeks for revision, documentation, testing, merging, etc.

Mentors who volunteered on the last thread have been posted in the Mentors section, but you should go in and edit your description to give some info about you, your areas of interest, etc. All mentor names should link to their wordpress.orgWordPress.org The community site where WordPress code is created and shared by the users. This is where you can download the source code for WordPress core, plugins and themes as well as the central location for community conversations and organization. https://wordpress.org/ profiles, as you see with the ones I’ve already posted. If you’d like to link to your own personal site for more info, please do so in the description rather than linking your name there.

It says please don’t edit the mentors section without talking to me first. If you have been a previous mentor for GSoC (or have been listed as mentor before but didn’t wind up with a mentee), consider yourself as having talked to me and go ahead and add yourself to the list/edit your description. If you have never gone through the GSoC process before, please pingPing The act of sending a very small amount of data to an end point. Ping is used in computer science to illicit a response from a target server to test it’s connection. Ping is also a term used by Slack users to @ someone or send them a direct message (DM). Users might say something along the lines of “Ping me when the meeting starts.” me in irc so I can review stuff with you (expectations, etc) before officially putting you on the list.

If folks could start adding to this page now and continue over the weekend, then by Monday we can do a review to see if there are big gaps where I need to go mentor-hunting before submitting the application.

Thanks!

#gsoc, #gsoc2014