Hello everyone,
Recently Google announced some changes in the GSoC program - Expanding Google Summer of Code in 2022. Some of the changes are quite nice from their previous change of making the time duration short - which might not have been suitable for our projects. In this iteration of change, some are:
Expanding Eligibility
The program will no longer be solely focused on university students or recent graduates. We realize there are many folks that could benefit from the GSoC program that are at various stages of their career, recent career changers, self-taught, those returning to the workforce, etc. so we wanted to allow these folks the opportunity to participate in GSoC.
Multiple sizes of projects
we are going to support both medium sized projects (~175 hours) and large projects (~350 hours) in 2022
and a few other changes like flexible timeline makes the participation more interesting
This interested a few of our community member and they reached out if we would be participating in GSoC this coming year.
I am +1 to apply and see if we would be selected but the challenge we have faced in past is having nice™ projects that we can open applications for. I want to hear your thoughts. Do you have a project in mind that, or would you be willing to volunteer as a general mentor/project mentor?
Note: Even when we apply, it’s possible that we are not accepted (with GSoC’s plan of focusing on smaller orgs)
I don’t have a specific project in mind, but I could probably come up with one or several. I’d also be willing to be a general mentor. The new flexibility in GSOC gives us an opportunity to have more projects and more contributors participating.
The expanded eligibility would surely give an opportunity to contributors from all walks of life and all kinds of backgrounds to partake and be a part of the community. It can be a worthwhile experiment on contributor retention too to see the relation between the likeliness of folks staying back and their origin. The liberty in picking the projects of varied sizes opens us up to the list of tasks (which, say, might not combine to be a project due to their disjointed nature) that can end up being a newcomer’s FOSS experience with them (and mentors), having the freedom to decide how they progress.
As much as I am looking forward to being of assistance there, I do not hold my breath in the wake of us not making it into the list of mentored organizations for GSoC in 2021 and the fact that GSoC is now looking more into smaller organizations. How about we start early with a survey to the teams regarding the kind of work that they would likely want to put forth to the interns and the bandwidth of the team members for being mentors? As always, thank you for driving this forward and opening up the gate for a lot many contributors to Fedora via the mentored projects.
the way it seems,
There is some interest from community members and it’s worth giving it a shot – though I would like this thread to get a little more traction.
@sumantrom and I are going to work on application draft, and will be opening a call for project for the upcoming GSoC season.