In about 2 weeks time, Google will start taking applications from mentoring organisations for this year's Summer of Code[0]. OpenAFS has been a mentoring organisation for the last 2 years, and intends to apply again this year. Summer of Code has been a great experience for those of us involved in it, and has produced real benefits for the community - we've gained both new developers, and significant new functionality as a result of it. It would be great to continue this with this year's event.
As part of our application, we need to provide Google with a realistic list of potential projects which students may undertake. In addition, students are invited to propose their own choice of project. We also need a pool of people who are interested in mentoring students undertaking those projects. So, we need: *) Project proposals *) Mentors *) Students Project Proposals ----------------- A good project proposal is one that provides an interesting, challenging, but achievable goal for the student. In total, they have 12 weeks to work on the proposal, and we want to make the best use of that time - thus projects which require lengthy waits for standardisation work, or those which require knowledge of the entire AFS codebase are likely to be less successful than ones which are focussed on a smaller area of the code. The proposal should lay out the nature of the problem, the necessary skills that the student should have (language knowledge, etc), and the skills that the student will gain through working on it. Lists to further background reading are very useful, and an estimated difficulty level can be helpful in attracting the right student. It's hugely helpful if the proposer of the project is also prepared to mentor, although I don't believe that it's essential if someone else is prepared to take on that role. Mentors ------- The mentor is the link between the student and the AFS community. It's a hugely rewarding position. Ideally you're available to your student to answer questions throughout the Summer of Code process - it's estimated that mentoring requires a time commitment of between 5 and 10 hours a week. Mentors don't have to be brilliant coders, or conversant with every area of OpenAFS. Knowing who, and how, to ask is far more important than knowing the code inside out. In fact, mentoring can be a great way of improving your own knowledge of OpenAFS - I picked up most of what I know about the kernel module through answering Dragos's questions when he was writing disconnected support. We need at least one, and ideally 2, mentors for every project that goes forwards. Students -------- Finally, we need to attract students. In the past, these have tended to be new to the community, although if there is anyone reading this who wants to take part, it would be great to hear from you too - you don't need to wait till the programme starts to speak to us! Also, given the academic background of many OpenAFS users, if those of you at Universities have students who might be interested, please do let them know. There's a great opportunity for them to do significant work, and to gain skills that can lead to future employment (at least two of our former SoC students gained employment as a result of skills they'd learnt during summer of code). Students receive, from Google, a payment of $5000 if they complete the program [1] I look forward to hearing from you all... Cheers, Simon [0] http://socghop.appspot.com/ [1] http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2010/faqs#administrivia _______________________________________________ OpenAFS-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openafs.org/mailman/listinfo/openafs-devel
