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Hi Wayne Beaton,
Welcome to the biggest GSoC program ever with 212 open source organizations participating in GSoC 2018 and we expect to accept more students than ever before too. And a special welcome to 41 organizations participating in GSoC for the first time!
As you have probably noticed many proactive, excited students have already started reaching out to your orgs to discuss project ideas - this is a very good thing!
We want to give you a quick overview of the next few months and address some of the common questions you may have these first few weeks of the program.
Important Info for 2018
- There are 3 evaluation periods where mentors are required to complete an evaluation of their student. After the first 4 weeks of coding, after 8 weeks of coding and then at the end (after 12 weeks of coding). The evaluation forms are relatively short with multiple choice questions and a couple of free form responses to give your student feedback (which hopefully is being done weekly already by the mentor).
- Students can only be accepted into GSoC 2 times. Google Admins will do a sanity check on all accepted students once you select your students in early April so you do not need to be concerned about this.
- UNIVERSITIES: If you are a university, we expect you to select students outside of your program. Selecting students from your university is okay (1-2 students tops) but if all of the students you select are from your university then you likely won’t be accepted into GSoC again.
- Students can only submit 3 proposals. After discussions at the Mentor Summit last year we have decided to implement this for 2018 (last year we allowed 5). This should eliminate many of the low quality proposals.
- We allow 13-17 year olds to be mentors for GSoC as long as they have parental consent to be a part of the program. An additional form is required. We will send the form to the student once they have registered.
Inviting Mentors to your Organization
Organization Administrators should be reaching out to mentors and sending them invitations to be a part of their organization now. The mentor will then click the link in the email they receive to create their account.
GSoC Mentor-invite Mailing List
For those that have opted into the GSoC mentor mailing list (available on your profile page) we will bulk add you to the list on February 26. Then we will add additional folks who opt in about once a week throughout the program period. You can remove yourself through the groups interface at any time. You can also update your settings to receive a daily digest of emails and other options. This generally is not a very high traffic list but there will be more questions over the next two months on this list than probably later in the program.
The GSoC mentor mailing list is a great way to ask questions of other org admins and mentors and to get their feedback and help.
Important Upcoming Dates
Now - March 12: Proactive students will reach out to you and ask questions about your ideas list and receive feedback from your org so they can start crafting their project proposals. Org Admins should be inviting mentors.
March 12 - March 27 16:00 UTC: Students will submit their draft proposals through the program website for you to give solid feedback on.
March 27 - April 8: Review all submitted student proposals with your org and consider how many you want to select and how many you can handle. Decide on the minimum/maximum number of student slots to request- do not request more than your org can handle - this could take students away from orgs who have excellent student prospects and need the slots.
April 9, 16:00 UTC: Deadline to submit slot requests (OAs enter requests)
April 10, 16:00 UTC: Slot allocations are announced by Google
April 10 - 17 16:00 UTC: Select the proposals to become student projects. At least 1 mentor must be assigned to each project before it can be selected. (OAs enter selections)
April 17 - April 23: Google Program Admins will do another review of student eligibility
April 23: Accepted GSoC 2018 students/projects are announced
April 23 - May 14: Community Bonding Period
May 13: Deadline to notify Google Admins of an inactive student that you wish to be removed from the program
May 14: Coding begins
June 11-15: First evaluation period - mentors evaluate students, students evaluate mentors
July 9 - 13: Second evaluation period - mentors evaluate students, students evaluate mentors
August 6-14: Students wrap up their projects and submit final evaluation of their mentor
August 14 - August 21: Mentors submit final evaluations of students
August 21: Students passing GSoC 2018 are announced
Organization Payments
Complete details regarding GSoC 2018 payments will be sent out in April to Org Admins. In the meantime, please note that Google will pay each organization after final evaluations are submitted.
- Orgs who participated in 2017: do not need to create a new Payoneer account (if your banking details changed, please update them through your Payoneer dashboard).
- Orgs new to GSoC or not yet signed up with Payoneer: we will send you an invitation in late April to create your account - do not go and create your own account now.
Quick Glossary
Proposal: A document which describes the project the student wants to work on for your organization. Should include a timeline containing clear milestones and specific deliverables.
Slot: Google will grant each org a certain number of project “slots” based on requests and history with GSoC. Each slot can hold one student/project.
Project: Once a student has been selected and projects are announced, their proposal becomes a project for the remainder of the program.
More Information
If you have not yet read the Roles and Responsibilities page created with the help of GSoC Org admins and mentors, we highly encourage you to read this and share it with your prospective mentors - it will help everyone understand what is expected of them over the next 6 months.
You may also want to check out the Mentor Guide, which contains important information for both Mentors and Org Admins at each stage of the program.
Email Archive
All emails sent to Org Admins and Mentors during this year’s program are stored in the 2018 GSoC OA and Mentor email archive.
If you have any questions please contact us at gsoc-support@xxxxxxxxxx
Best,
GSoC team
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