It's that time of year again! Google's Summer of Code program is happening again this year, and a few of us are actively working on getting our preliminary stuff together to make this a huge success. Like last year, our goal is to have 2 mentors available per student. This has the following advantages: - People can take vacations without leaving the student "stranded" for a week. - If you don't know the answer to something, chances are your counter- part will. - It eases the time burden on both mentors because it's split between two people. - Students always have someone to turn to for help. - It shows Google that we're very committed to student success. However, there are currently only 25 mentors signed up to the SoC mentors group: http://groups.drupal.org/soc-2007-mentors. That means we could only handle a maximum of 12 students, which is fewer than last year. :( And that assumes that everyone in the group is able to be a mentor for whatever projects end up getting accepted. Ideally, I'd love to see this number up around 50, with a diverse range of skills, backgrounds, and experiences so we have all of our bases covered. So please, if you have knowledge in a particular area of Drupal (such as image/file handling), a particular skillset (AJAX was really hot last year, for example), feel comfortable enough to be a "backup" mentor, or just plain want to help students succeed, *please* sign up for the group and help us out! You can request a subscription here: http://groups.drupal.org/og/subscribe/2741 ... in "Additional details" please specify what your area of expertise is, what project proposals (if any) you see yourself being able to mentor, and whether you think you have time to be a primary or secondary mentor. Now. What if you don't see yourself able to act in a 'mentor' capacity, but still want to help? For example, you're a Drupal developer just kind of getting your feet wet, or you're experienced with Drupal but waaayyyy too busy to take on mentoring duties. Great news, you can still help! :) a) The Drupal Dojo folks are actively working on a "Getting started with Drupal development" guide, which will help new SoC students (and all other developers new to the project) become acquainted with Drupal and its architecture more quickly. You can help with that over here: http://docs.drupaldojo.org/getting-started-with-drupal- development - this is something that new developers in particular can be extremely helpful in, because you guys know best what tripped you up as you were learning, and can read the resulting text to determine if it's still confusing. b) We still need A LOT of help creating decent project proposals: http://drupal.org/node/110704. Proposals need to be: - properly defined, including a list of deliverables. See for example http://drupal.org/node/121112 - realistically scoped, so that they can be completed in 3 months by someone who might know nothing about Drupal. See http://drupal.org/ node/120260 - do-able by a student. This means no crazy stuff like "Security audit all of core and contrib" or "rewrite the entire file API." - interesting and beneficial to students... we don't want them doing "grunt work" if at all possible... mention career and academic benefits outside of Drupal that the student will gain for working on the project. - have some kind of code as a deliverable. We can't have proposals that are about just creating documentation or researching into a certain thing. Providing you can spec your project idea out within these parameters, this is a big chance to get someone interested in whatever personal Drupal itch you have to scratch. Sorry, that got really long. :P In summary: - We need help with Summer of Code! - If you know a lot about something, please sign up to be a mentor: http://groups.drupal.org/og/subscribe/2741 - If you have great ideas, please write a good project proposal: http://drupal.org/node/110704. - If you are a good teacher or a newbie, please help with writing beginner docs for developers: http://docs.drupaldojo.org/getting- started-with-drupal-development Also if possible, be relatively quick about it. ;) I'd like to have all of our mentor names and most of our project proposals nailed down by March 1. Thanks!! -Angie