General improvements to GSOC

From Google Summer of Code Mentor Wiki

As GSOC has evolved the issues discussed at the summit have shifted focus. The first summit about half of the talks were about issues with the program. Now the focus seems to have shifted, to more focus on finding out what other groups are doing to tackle X..

This is a great thing. It seems like this is a good place to focus on improving the program. How can we facilitate this and improve things for everyone.

We had a discussion on this and came away with a number of suggestions.

There are a number of common items that each org probably does, and it would be very useful to have a central place (Other than the summit) to collect these ideas and for people to find them. Not only for people that are attending the summit but most of these things will be of use to the open source community as a whole. So it would really be nice if this were highly visible and world readable. It would be great if on the page of participants for google summer of code if an org had documetation on the topics listed below, the link would be published on that page.

Some of the topics we though would be good:

* How does a group Administrate their mentors and students
      * What do you do for revision control
      * What information do you give students at the beginning of the project
      * How do you communicate
            * Mentor <-> student
            * Student <-> Org
            * Student <-> End User
      * How do you keep students involved after GSOC
* Tips for mentors  (Maybe this shouldn't be here or pull stuff from above for mentor specific things)
* Tips for students
       * Code style guides
       * How do you find things in your code
       * How do you debug your code
       * How do you do testing
       * How do you do profiling
       

Other things we talked about:

       * Org admins would like to see final reports for mentors, not sure if its a bug or something else.  (It's been confirmed that this is a bug)
       * Would be nice to review previous mentor reviews.  Was also brought up that this might not be a good thing storing a history on a mentor.
       * Was mentioned that new groups need to be aware that timezone's can make or break a students success and its something you should take into consideration when pairing up mentors with students.
       * Another hint for new groups is do not be afraid to not use all of your slots.  Don't over extend yourself.  There is a feeling of groups competing for slots, its better to do good projects than accept too many slots and then have a bunch that you can not keep a good handle on.
       * Complaints that orgs under a umbrella orgs kind of get the shaft with the number of slots that they get.
       * Would be nice if there was some sort of initiation for new mentor groups and or new mentors.
       * It would be nice to allow an org to accept a group project.  There were mixed feelings on this.
              * One suggestion was it might work better to allow a group but make one student the accepted member and the other students in the group are just support.
       * It might be nice to help retain students by offering a bonus check if they are still active in the community at the end of next year.
       * GSOC Nametags are too low....