GSoC 2011: Call for Mentors

[Rainer Müller]

Hello,

I am going to submit an application on behalf of The MacPorts Project
for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program 2011. I think most of you
will already have heard of it. Google pays students to work on various
Open Source projects over the summer. It is also a good start for
students with Open Source development. MacPorts is taking part in this
program every year since 2007.

See also <http://code.google.com/soc/> for more background information.

First, we need to apply to Google to be accepted as an mentoring
organization. Some prodecure as last year, as most questions remained
the smae. Here is the wiki page with the questions Google published and
our answers from last year (nevertheless they could be improved):

  http://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCodeOrgApplication

Please stop by the wiki page and fill in answers or correct/rewrite
existing ones. My language and grammar is not the best and a native
speaker can probably help here. I hope that collaborating will bring out
a good application with which we will be able to participate in GSoC again.

The deadline for this application is *this Friday, March 11th*, but I
would like to submit a first draft around Monday/Tuesday.

When we get accepted and get students interested in working for us, each
student is supposed to work closely with a mentor who should guide
the student through their project and the Open Source world. A mentor
should have knowledge of the project and will communicate with the
student over the summer to watch the progress and work out any problems.

So, we need mentors from our MacPorts community who are willing to care
for a student. Please participate!

Also, if you have a specific idea what could be improved in MacPorts,
but you never had the time to do it yourself, please put a proposal on
our ideas page. I already cleared up the list with the new ideas we
gathered a few days ago. We need mentors for these, of course.

Ideas page: http://trac.macports.org/wiki/SummerOfCode

I will stand up to be the organization administrator again as I already
did this last year. But we also need a backup administrator as a
requirement from Google. Bill, would you have time to do this again?
Anyone else would like to volunteer?

If you have more questions regarding GSoC 2011 for MacPorts, please do
not hesitate to contact me.

Rainer

PS: Sorry if I caused a déjà vu in someone's head, this mail is mainly
identical with what I sent last year :-P