We need help for Summer of Code

We need help with the Google Summer of Code.

Desperately.

We have almost 100 proposals submitted and we’re desperately short on mentors. If you’re interested in being a Google Summer of Code Eclipse mentor, please let me know (wayne at eclipse dot org).

What does being a mentor require? It requires some of your time. Last year, our mentors spent an average of about four hours each week on each student they mentored (Caffeine Chris mentored about half a dozen of the projects last year). Students are expected to provide their own workstations and work locations. Last year some of the mentors interacted with their students over the phone, Skype, IM, and IRC. I think a few of them actually made some space for their students (but this isn’t necessary).

With reasonable investment, you get reasonable return. In many cases, the code that resulted from SoC projects ended up in Eclipse projects. At least two students from last year’s SoC became Eclipse committers. Good stuff comes out of this, but you have to invest a little time. You’ll have to decide if it’s worth it.

Signing up as a mentor doesn’t commit you to mentoring a project. Once you’re in, you get to review the proposals; if there’s something you like, you can offer yourself as a mentor. If you don’t find any of the projects interesting, you can at least help us wade through the proposals and identify the good ones. Then Google gets to decide how many of our projects it wants to fund and you may find yourself with a eager well-feed protegé.

We have particular need for mentors familiar with CDT; there are a handful of CDT proposals that I can’t make heads or tails of. They sound good, but I can’t tell how useful they are. There’s a couple that will be of interest to the platform team, Maya folks, and much, much, more.

Anyway, if any of this sounds useful to you, drop me a line. Philippe Ombredanne is the real brains of this operation so I’ll forward your interest on to him. Please make sure that you tell me a little bit about yourself; it’s important that we know who the mentors are.