GSoC 2016: applications open, deadline = Fri, 19/2

Hi,

The GSoC (Google Summer of Code) application for mentoring organizations is now open. The deadline is Friday, February 19 at 19:00 UTC. That is: very soon. New website here: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/. More info about Git's previous GSoC iterations there: http://git.github.io/SoC-2015-Microprojects/, http://git.github.io/SoC-2015-Org-Application/.

I haven't been watching the list very closely the last few weeks, but I didn't see a discussion on whether we shall participate this year, other than "Starting on a microproject for GSoC" (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/284958).

I think participating is a good thing, but it needs mentors, ie. people and time. On my side, I'd be happy to give a hand to GSoC, but unfortunately, I won't have time to properly mentor a student. I can be co-admin, and can help someone to mentor, but only if this someone agrees to do most of the work. Yes, I do realize that this sounds like "we should do it, but someone else should do the work" ;-).

So, the first question is: are there volunteers to be GSoC mentors this year? For those who never did it: mentoring means giving advices to the student (partly done during the "microproject" phase in our organization), participating actively in reviews (possibly doing some first review iterations off-list to avoid overloading the list). On overall, the goal is to make sure that some useful code is merged before the end. It's a very enjoyable experience, it can be done with reasonable knowledge of Git's codebase and community (no need to be an old-timer), but it needs time to be done properly (expect to get ~10 iterations of each patch series, and spend hour(s) on each). And you get a nice tee-shirt to show off with your geek friends.

If we have enough potential mentors, then the next questions are: who's the admin? Work on the application itself, and on the list of ideas.

Cheers,