Wayland for GSoC

[Ekaterina Gerasimova]

Hi all,

Daniel, pq and I would like to submit Wayland as an organisation
(usually referred to as an "org") for GSoC 2016 to attract new, young
contributors to the project. In theory, Wayland would fit under the
X.Org Foundation umbrella org but X.Org apparently doesn't get as many
student slots as they would like and the two organisations are more
likely to get more in total if applying separately. Having Wayland as
a separate org will also give it more promenance, as part of the aim
here is to attract new contributors.


If you are interested in joining as a GSoC student, you need to be in
full time education on the 25th of April this year. Please talk to one
of the potential mentors about projects that you are interested in. If
you have previously contributed to Wayland, that contribution can be
used as part of your application. If this is your first time
contributing, you can find some ideas for simpler tasks at
https://phabricator.freedesktop.org/w/wayland/gsoc_2016/threshold/


>From the organisational side, there are a number of tasks that we are
still working on at this point and all help would be appreciated.


Spread the word: you can promote that Wayland is going to take part in
GSoC this year and attract potential students. Even a sentence at the
end of a blog post or a tweet will go a long way. The relevant link
ishttps://phabricator.freedesktop.org/w/wayland/gsoc_2016/


Ideas and mentors: the list of ideas so far can be found via
https://phabricator.freedesktop.org/w/wayland/gsoc_2016/ideas/ and you
are welcome to contribute ideas even if you don't want to mentor. Just
talk to one of the potential mentors on IRC.

If you are interested in joining as a mentor, please add yourself to
any projects which you are interested in. Any project which is
accepted will need a primary and a backup mentor so it would be good
to see at least two people listed per project idea. You can choose how
many interns you would want to mentor (I recommend only one if it's
your first time mentoring) and if you find that none of the interns
are compatible with you, you don't have to select any.

Mentoring involves helping the interns learn the contribution
processes, go through reviews, giving them technical guidance on their
contributions and helping them become part of the community. You would
need to make yourself available for helping potential interns put
together their applications from March until April, and for mentoring
from May until August. The weekly time commitment depends very much on
the capability of the intern. The idea is that you figure out whether
you can work well with the intern during the application period (until
April) so that you only choose suitable interns for the summer.

Backup mentors will normally only have to step in if the primary
mentor becomes unavailable for some reason. In my exprience with GSoC,
this happens very rarely.

For more information about GSoC mentoring, see
https://flossmanuals.net/GSoCMentoring/

Also if you know anyone who would make a good mentor, please spread the word!


Administration: we need to have at least two org admins. I have
volunteered to be one, but we need at least another one and can have
up to 5 in total. If you are interested in learning how GSoC works or
enjoy helping out with admin, then let me know by Friday and I'll add
you!

Org admins look after the org account on the website and making sure
that the reports on student progress are submitted by mentors at the
mid-point evaluations and final evaluations.

You can be a mentor and an org admin, so you don't have to choose
between the two.


Apart from helping acquire new contributors, GSoC contributes $500 per
student to the organisation. This money is usually used to further the
goals of the org (for example, goes towards hackfests), although some
orgs donate it to another org or, rarely, to the mentors. On top of
that, there is usally $500 available per student to go towards sending
the student to a relevant event (hackfest or conference). I would
personally recommend that these funds are used to hold a hackfest at
the start of the internship period, which is a very effective way to
help students become part of the community.


I would love to hear from you if you have any questions or comments.


Thanks
Kat