Hi everybody,
since we're invited to participate in this year's GSoC and since students can send their project proposals starting next week, I guess now is the time to register potential mentors with the system, so we can triage and assign proposals efficiently.
If helping a student get up to speed with coreboot development and open source development in general sounds like a great way to spend your time to you, please consider mentoring!
Note to potential student participants: There's a conflict of interest in being both a student and a mentor and so GSoC doesn't allow that. If you consider joining GSoC as a student (for any participating open source project) this year, don't ask to become a mentor.
Our expectations of a mentor are: - Being around for most of mid of March (when the applications rush in) to mid of August (when everything wraps up) - Work with the student to build a realistic project plan - Being the point of contact for a specific student working on a specific project from mid of May to mid of August - Following up on their student's progress and helping them along. This usually means: - One or more sync meetings with the student every week (schedule is up to you and your student to sort out) - Being available for helping them when they get stuck - Encourage them to participate in the community. Students with no prior OSS experience are often a bit shy, and a big part of GSoC is to help them get into it. This depends on the student, but can involve being their wingman on IRC, encouraging them to push code for review early and go through the feedback they get together (it often looks scary for new-comers) - 3 evaluations of the student's progress (in mid-June, -July, -August)
If that time frame covers a week or two of down time (vacation etc), we can likely handle that (but it helps to know about scheduled off-time in advance!) If it's more, maybe there should be more than one mentor to your student. If you're dropping out due to some unforeseen event, that's on David Hendricks and I (in our function as org admins) to sort out, finding a replacement or jumping in ourselves.
If you're interested, feel free to send me a private email and we'll take it from there.
Regards, Patrick