GSoC 2008 - Mentors Wanted!

As part of our organization application for GSoC 2008 we need to list possible mentors. At this stage of the process it is not a binding commitment. You can offer to be a mentor now and still back out later if the project you are really interested in doesn't get a student, or if your situation changes and you no longer will have the time.

One of the things that will help make our organization application look good to Google this year is having strong community support for GSoC 2008, in the form of having many mentors available for our ideas list. Google can easily determine the size of our mailing list membership (~859 addresses) and it would be nice if we can show better than a 0.23% mentor rate. :-)

Being a mentor will eventually become a binding commitment once we start matching up students<->mentors and we know exactly how many slots Google will offer us. Backing out at this point could cause us to scramble to locate another mentor, or worse, lose the student. That gets set in stone during the week of April 7th - 11th, 2008.

Based on prior GSoC experience (inside and outside of Git) it is estimated that a mentor will need to spend between 5-10 hours per week (~1-2 hours per day) with their student, over email, IRC, etc. to help guide the student through their project. Projects run from May 26th through August 11th.

OK, enough, onto the project list!

  http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/SoC2008Ideas

That is only a starting list of possible projects. At present Dscho and myself are listed as possible mentors for a vast majority of these projects. I'd love to get some more members of the community involved this year.

If you are interested in being a mentor for a GSoC project, please list your name next to the project, and if at all possible an email address so prospective students can contact you. If you have a good project idea in mind, but don't see it on the wiki, please add it!

I would also appreciate it if you can send me your Google Mail account, as we need to list each mentor's Google Mail username in the organzation application. This allows Google to see that we have strong support for GSoC 2008, and gives you access to view the student applications once they start getting submitted.