Hi, The Google Summer of Code organization announced some exciting changes to the program next year [1]: (1) Starting in 2022, the program will be open to all newcomers of open source that are 18 years and older, no longer focusing solely on university students. (2) GSoC Contributors will be able to choose from multiple size projects ~175 hour (medium) and 350 hour (large). (3) We are building increased flexibility around the timing of projects - there is an option to extend the standard 12 week coding time frame to a maximum of 22 weeks.
I wanted to take this announcement to kick-off the preparation for our participation in the program next year as a means of attracting and mentoring new contributors to our community. The earlier we attract prospective "GSoC Contributors" the higher the chances of a successful project and retaining the contributors after the program. The best GSoC project ideas are those which are self-contained: have a well defined scope, discreet milestones and definition of done. Generally the areas which are easier for GSoC contributors to get started are: - UX improvements - Tools - Benchmarking - Refactoring and Modularization I would like to invite contributors to start tagging issues in JIRA with the "gsoc" tag as a means of indicating that particular task can be potentially turned into a GSoC project. With the large volume of CEPs being voted and approved recently, it would be great if a portion of the "nice-to-have" subtasks which are not a strict requirement of the CEP to be created with GSoC mentoring in mind. Ie. benchmark CEP, extend CEP with some additional but not-core functionality, CEP UX improvements, etc. With this in mind I'd like to ask CEP shepherds to create and tag these tasks with the "gsoc" tag. Please note that mentoring a GSoC project is not only a good way to attract new members to the community but also a great way of recruiting new members to your professional teams, so there's great personal, professional and community benefits to mentoring a GSoC project. Once we have a good amount of tasks with the "gsoc" tag I will work with prospective mentor to refine the tasks and create a "GSoC Project Ideas" page and we can write a blog post to announce the project ideas to prospective GSoC contributors. Please let me know what do you think. Paulo [1] https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/11/expanding-google-summer-of-code-in-2022.html
