r3gllc wrote on Monday, May 21, 2012:
Instead, of the students working in other jobs during summer, (not related with programming or creating a small access DB in a mining firm in a developing country which will never be used) google is providing them a stipend to do something menaingful , something which they might like and continue to see it’s implication in real world. As such, the competition to be a GSOC organization is pretty stiff. As par our experience, google chooses organizations based on a formal track record of mentoring. Basically they are trying to find out, if the organziation has few mentors who can volunteer some dedicated time during the summer months to spend with the student to make them interested in opensource development and in the community.
Here is the brief about mentoring organization:
Mentoring Organizations
1. What is a mentoring organization?
A group running an active free/open source software project, e.g. the Python Software Foundation. The project does not need to be a legally incorporated entity. If you’re looking for a broader picture, you can find a list of all mentoring organizations who have participated in the past on the Google Summer of Code 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 pages. Mentoring organizations must produce and release software under an Open Source Initiative approved license in order to participate in the program. Mentors for their organizations must at least be committers for the corresponding project and their participation in Google Summer of Code on the organization’s behalf must be approved by the organization administrator via Melange.
2. What is the role of a mentoring organization?
Each mentoring organization is expected to provide:
A pool of project ideas for students to choose from, publicly published by the mentoring organization as an Ideas list
An organization administrator to act as the project’s main point of contact for Google
A person or group responsible for review and ranking of student applications, both those proposals which tie into the org’s Ideas list and “blue-sky” proposals
A person or group of people responsible for monitoring the progress of each accepted student and to mentor her/him as the project progresses
A person or group responsible for taking over for a student’s assigned mentor in the event they are unable to continue mentoring, e.g. take a vacation, have a family emergency
A written evaluation of each student participant, including how s/he worked with the group, whether you would want to work with them again
In addition to these responsibilities, a mentoring organization should actively encourage each student developer to participate in the project’s community in whichever way makes the most sense for the project, be it development mailing lists, idling in the project’s IRC channel, participating in the project’s forum, etc. A truly successful mentoring organization will work diligently to ensure that as many of their students as possible remain active project participants long after the conclusion of the program.
3. What is the role of an organization administrator?
An organization administrator oversees the overall progress of a mentoring organization and its students throughout the program. Organization administrators will have different responsibilities depending on the organization, but at the very least they will need to:
1. Submit the organization’s program application to Google
2. Act as the main point of contact between Google and the organization
3. Respond to any inquiries from Google within 48 hours
4. Assign a back up mentor should a mentor be unable to work with a student
5. Ensure all program evaluations are completed on time on or before the deadlines
For some projects, the organization administrator also acted as an arbiter when disputes arose between students and mentors, but each project should individually decide how such situations should be handled.
4. Can a mentoring organization have more than one administrator?
Yes, in fact it is required. It’s good to have a back-up administrator identified who can cover for your administrator should s/he go out of town, etc. If your back-up administrator becomes the primary administrator, make sure to notify Google’s program administrators.
5. What kind of mentoring organizations should apply?
As you can see from the lists of our mentoring organizations for 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011 many different types of open source projects participate in Google Summer of Code. As long as your project can provide mentors and is releasing code under an Open Source Initiative approved license, you are welcome and encouraged to apply. Unfortunately, there are far more great open source projects than we can work with, so if your project is highly niche or has very few users, chances are that your application will not be accepted.
6. When will accepted mentoring organizations be announced?
We will announce the list of accepted mentoring organizations on the Google Summer of Code 2012 homepage on March 16, 2012.
7. Are mentoring organizations required to use the code produced?
No. While we hope that all the code that comes out of this program will find a happy home, we’re not requiring organizations to use the students’ code.
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The GSOC 2012 just commenced this week. So for 2013 there is ample time - but openemr community first needs to decide now if they want to be a mentoring organization of GSOC or not. If yes, some type of format mentoring activities need to be started. The other important step is to identify the organization administrator(s) as soon as possible. Google wants only one point of contact. As such the admins role starts much earlier then the summer period and in-fact it is a full-time job for a period ( the administrator creates the application, coordinates everything). We cannot commit, but we probably will be able to assign one of our senior member as openemr organization administrator for GSOC 2013, if required.