<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" id="internal-source-marker_0.437480631109311">Hi All,</span><br>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Google Summer of Code is back! It has been </span><a href="http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-summer-of-code-announced-at-lca.html"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 153); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">publicly announced</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">,
and applications from mentoring organizations (that's us - Drupal) to
participate will be due the last week of Feb (just in time for everyone
to be distracted by Drupalcon!).</span><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">No organization admin has been chosen yet. That will be decided in coming weeks.</span><br>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">So
let's start talking strategy about how to tackle managing SoC moving
forward. We need people to help, preferably by a team of former mentors,
students, and ardent summer of code fans.</span><br><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Know everything already? Don’t wanna read more! Want to help?</span><a href="http://groups.drupal.org/node/121634"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 153); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"> Sign yourself up</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">!</span><br>
<h2><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">What happens during SoC?</span></h2>
<h2><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">SoC is roughly broken up into 6 phases:</span></h2>
<ol><li style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Pre-applications</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">:
There is a bunch of up-front work that needs to be done in order to
submit an application to be a mentor organization in SoC. Among the
tasks here include recruiting mentors, coming up with potential SoC
projects for students to work on, and working out logistics about how
the later steps are going to happen. Work should ideally start on this </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">now</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, or very soon.</span></li>
<li style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Submitting mentor application</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">:
Each organization that takes part (Eclipse, Drupal, Apache, etc.) needs
to submit an application in order to be accepted into Summer of Code.
There are a variety of questions, about motivation, about plans of
attack for various problems that come up, etc. Here is our</span><a href="http://groups.drupal.org/node/9487"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 153); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">application from 2008</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">, for reference.</span></li>
<li style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Reviewing student applications</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">:
If we're accepted as a mentoring organization, about a week later
applications will start coming in from students. These need to be
reviewed and voted on by the mentoring team. Voting ranks the
applications, and the number of slots we get from Google will give us
the top N applicants.</span></li><li style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">"Community bonding" time</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">:
There is a 2-month period before Summer of Code officially starts
that's intended to be a bit of 'dipping baby toes' into the water of a
community. Things like getting a CVS account, setting up a wiki page /
<a href="http://drupal.org">drupal.org</a> project. </span></li><li style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Summer of Code</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">:
Here's where the actual coding and mentoring happens, over the summer.
The biggest thing to do here is to make sure students (and mentors!) are
keeping on track and not falling off the face of the earth. Constant
communication is key. Be aware that Google will require a mid-term and
final report from all mentors and students, and the mentors never follow
through, so you will need to beat them.</span></li><li style="list-style-type: decimal; font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Post-Summer of Code</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">:
Here's an area where we've traditionally kind of failed miserably. Far
too often, students get to the end of SoC and we never hear from them
again. We should start envisioning ways we can entice students to stick
around for the long-term.</span></li></ol><br><h2><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">About Mentor Recruiting</span></h2>
<h2><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">The
more mentors we have in the more diverse areas, the more of a chance
there is we can take more students. Mentors should be knowledgeable in
their subject matter, kind and patient with new people, and </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">available</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
for at least 5-10 hours/week over the summer. You'll need gmail
addresses from all of them, because they'll need to be added to the
mentor panel on Google's side. If the timing works out, recruiting at
Drupalcon would be ideal.</span></h2><h2><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Traditionally,
Drupal has had a system where each student is assigned two mentors, in
case one is unavailable. I believe there's some contention around how
well this works in practice, so we could talk about changing this if we
want. The downside of the two-mentor rule is that if we end up with 20
slots again, that means you're essentially managing 60+ people and
making sure no one's slipping through the cracks. This is really
challenging, and is worth putting some thought into from the outset on
how to deal with this.</span></h2><h2><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Experience
has shown that lots of people want to be mentors in theory, but can't
actually hack it when the time comes (almost universally, due to
unforseen unavailability). I recommend pairing a known experienced
mentor with a new keen one. More often than not, the new keen one will
be the superstar, but the old experienced one can lend guidance when
required.</span></h2><h2><span style="font-size: 18pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: bold; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">About Project Proposals</span></h2>
<h2><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">A good proposal is challenging. It needs to be specced out, but not </span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: italic; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">too</span><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
specced out. It needs to be do-able within a 2 month timeframe, bearing
in mind that about half of these students are coming in with no Drupal
experience. It needs to have community support. And, it needs a
competent mentor (preferably more than one).</span></h2><h2><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Each year, we handled this by asking community members (and students!) to propose their projects on </span><a href="http://groups.drupal.org/google-summer-code-2011"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 153); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;">http://groups.drupal.org/google-summer-code-2011</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">
This allowed them to be vetted, which was actually kind of nice because
it weeded out a few that were never going to be accepted. It also helps
when ranking the applications if something has a lot of people excited
about it.</span></h2><h2><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Okay, so how are we going to do this?</span></h2>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Want to help?</span><a href="http://groups.drupal.org/node/121634"><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 153); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline;"> Sign yourself up</span></a><span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">!</span><br>
<span style="font-size: 11pt; font-family: Arial; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; font-weight: normal; font-style: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><br clear="all"><b>Sumit Kataria</b><br>
(415) 830-6313 | Skype: sumit.kataria1<br>Google Voice: <span><span style="font-weight: normal; color: rgb(102, 102, 102);"></span><a title="Go to phones" href="https://www.google.com/voice/#phones" target="_blank">(510) 394-4339</a></span><br>
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