Re: Google Summer of Code 2009

[Jim Whitehead II <jnwhiteh@...>]

On Sat, Jan 17, 2009 at 10:55 PM, Matthew M. Burke <matthew@bluedino.net> wrote:
>
> Google has announced that they will run the Summer of Code program again
> this summer (2009).  Details can be found at
> http://code.google.com/soc/2008/.  In a nutshell: university students from
> around the world will submit proposals to develop software for one of a
> number of open source software projects.  The various oss projects provide
> the mentoring and Google provides cash stipends to the students (there is
> also a small payment per mentor).
>
> Last year the Lua community applied to be one of the mentoring
> organizations.  Although not accepted, there were a number of student
> projects for various mentoring organizations that used Lua.
>
> Specific dates have not been decided, but we're looking at roughly beginning
> of March for submitting an application to be a mentoring organization.  Last
> year, Jim Whitehead guided the process of submitting the application.  Due
> to prior commitments, Jim is not able to organize things this year.  I'm
> willing to do so (or would be quite happy for somebody else to volunteer!).
>
> If you are interested (and no commitment needed now), the two important
> things to work on now are to
>
> 1. Develop a list of possible projects.  Mentoring organizations propose
> various projects for students to work on, although students are allowed (and
> depending on the mentoring organization encouraged) to propose their own
> ideas.
>
> Last year's ideas pages can be found at
> http://lua-users.org/wiki/GoogleSummerOfCodeIdeas.  Feel free to add and
> edit.
>
> 2. Begin working on our application to be a mentoring organization.  A
> working draft from last year is at
> http://lua-users.org/wiki/GoogleSummerOfCodeMentoringApplication.  There
> will most likely be a fair amount of overlap between the questions on last
> year's application and this year's.

In general we may want to consider hosting an entirely separate wiki
for GSoC this year.  The main reason I say this is part of the
feedback we received last year was that the information was difficult
to find and not formatted very well.  We are somewhat constrained by
the lua-users.org wiki and from conversations in the past it doesn't
seem like there is any actual plans to make any movement to one of the
more modern packages (for a number of reasons).

I'm not sure what domain it should fall under, but I suspect having a
Google Summer of Code wiki linked off the main http://lua.org webpage,
regardless of where it is actually hosted would be a step in the right
direction.  Here is the "official" feedback I received that doesn't
address this particular issue (it was later determined that most of
this was formatting/layout/availability).

====================================================
You have several ideas that have no additional information at all, no
mentor, no description, just a name.  It would have been great to have
those filled out. The ideas themselves seem somewhat underspecified -
it would be helpful to have links to further resources and reading,
and flesh out the ideas a bit more.

There's great advice on constructing a good ideas list here:
http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/AdviceforMentors

It's wonderful that you have potential mentors listed - ++
====================================================

I think starting with a really strong project list and getting that
together now (rather than at the last minute) will greatly increase
our chances of being accepted this year.

- Jim