GSoC 2013: Call for Mentors

[Jeremy Lavergne]

I am going to submit an application on behalf of The MacPorts Project for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program 2013. I think most of you have already 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. As you may recall, Clemens joined us after successfully completing his GSoC project to create rev-upgrade for MacPorts.

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

First, we need to apply to Google to be accepted as an mentoring organization. Our full application cannot presently be viewed on their website, however you can see a summary <http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2011/macports>. Our full application is available in our wiki:

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

Please stop by the wiki page and fill in some answers or correct/rewrite existing ones. 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 29th*.

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.

MacPorts has applied to this program every year since 2007, and will continue to do so provided we have the mentors available. 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. Clemens and I are clearing up the list and there are still interesting and important projects on it. And we need mentors for these, of course.

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

I can be the organization administrator again as I already did this last year, but let me know if you'd be interested in learning/sharing/taking the reins. But we also need a backup administrator as a requirement from Google. Is someone willing to do this?

If you have more questions regarding GSoC 2013 for MacPorts, please do not hesitate to contact me or Clemens.