Google Summer of Code 2015

The Fedora project represented the Google Summer of Code program for 9 years and participating on year 2016 program as well. This wiki page serves as the GSoC portal. Please feel free to contact us via list for summer-coding clarifications/ more info, or the IRC channel: #fedora-summer-coding .

Students

Students who are looking for challenges and would like to contribute to the worlds' leading and innovative Linux Distro, this could be the chance. Please feel free to contact and refer to the material and start contacting mentors.

ideas.adoc

Why spend your summer working on FOSS?

When you work in the open on free software, you create a body of work that follows you for the rest of your life. Rather than a coding assignment done by thousands of other students and relegated to the bottom of the bit drawer at semester’s end, working in FOSS is a chance to contribute to a living project.

Working in FOSS gives you a chance to:

Work with real world large codebases.
Collaborate with real engineers and other professional experts.
Contribute to something meaningful while learning and earning student value.
Learn tools and processes that are just like what you are going to use if you work in technology after graduation.
Make friends and contacts around the globe.
Possibly attract attention that gets you an internship or job after graduation.
Create life time connections.

Why work with Fedora?

Our project is large and diverse. We are very experienced at working with new contributors and helping them be successful.

Many long-time contributors continue to be around, lending expertise and mentoring. People who stay around the community and do good work are noticed. They get hired for jobs from it, including being hired by Red Hat. Past Google Summer of Code students were hired by Red Hat, as well as interns in various positions. This is just an example, as experience and reputation in the Fedora Project communities is influential on your career in many ways.

As long-standing communities with many facets, it is possible for you to find many rewarding sub-projects to work on.

You should know that contributing to FOSS doesn’t require you to have super programming skills, or super-anything else. You just need be interested and curious enough, and be willing to become comfortable being productively lost. This is the state of learning through finding your way around and figuring things out.

Step-by-step guide for students

Please check the Step by Step guide for students.

Student’s application

Please refer to the following to follow the students' application process,

student_application_process.adoc

Administration

In order to clarify matters/ obtain more info related with the GSoC 2016 with Fedora please contact the administrators directly (please consider CCing the summer-coding list where ever possible).

Mentors

The contributors of the Fedora Project can propose ideas and mentor them. Please feel free to check following links and please add your ideas to the main idea page, further if you are not interested in proposing an idea but still want to support the program please check the students' idea page and pick one as per your interest.

How to work with students

One way is to provide an idea for students to work on. This idea might be very well planned out, in which case you may need a high-level of contact with the student to get it implemented correctly.
It is harder to find success where you are completely certain of how an idea needs to be implemented; finding a student with the skills and interest to implement a specific solution is a lot harder than finding a student with enough skills to respond to a use case need.
Where you can have looser ideas, you may be able to find a student who works as a sort-of intern who can implement a solution to a use case you have. In past experiences, students going after a use case are more likely to get somewhere with self-direction.
You may also want to work with a student who brings an idea to your sub-project. This requires a different level of communication throughout the project, but can be the most rewarding.

Mentor responsibilities

You are an essential part of the student’s success, the project’s success, and the success for your overall organization (Fedora, JBoss.org, or another).

Your responsibilities include:

Being an interface for an identified sub-project or SIG in Fedora.
Helping students communicate with the overall project and any upstream.
Be the final, accountable person for deciding if the student is successful or not, which affects payment.

List of Mentors

List of registered members

List of mentors who are registered with Google and added to the project as a mentor are listed here;

Registered Mentor List

Communication

Mailing List (GSOC related) : summer-coding
Mailing List (Technical) : devel
IRC : Channel - #fedora-summer-coding or #fedora-devel on Freenode

Time Line (Student version)

Reference : Full timeline

6 October, 2014: Program announced.
9 February, 2015: 19:00 UTC Mentoring organizations can begin submitting applications to Google.
20 February: 19:00 UTC Mentoring organization application deadline.
23 - 27 February: Google program administrators review organization applications.
2 March: 19:00 UTC List of accepted mentoring organizations published on the Google Summer of Code 2015 site.
Interim Period: Would-be students discuss project ideas with potential mentoring organizations.
6 March 16:00 UTC: IRC feedback meeting for rejected organizations for Google Summer of Code 2015. #gsoc on freenode.net. Rejected organizations may also choose to email the administrators directly for feedback.
14 March: 19:00 UTC Student application period opens.
27 March: 19:00 UTC Student application deadline.
Interim Period: Mentoring organizations review and rank student proposals; where necessary, mentoring organizations may request further proposal detail from the student applicant.
13 April: Mentoring organizations should have requested slots via their profile in Melange by this point.
15 April: Slot allocations published to mentoring organizations.
Interim Period: Slot allocation trades happen amongst organizations. Mentoring organizations review and rank student proposals; where necessary, mentoring organizations may request further proposal detail from the student applicant.
21 April: First round of de-duplication checks happens; organizations work together to try to resolve as many duplicates as possible.
24 April: All mentors must be signed up and all student proposals matched with a mentor -07:00 UTC. Student acceptance choice deadline.IRC meeting to resolve any outstanding duplicate accepted students - 19:00 UTC #gsoc (organizations must send a delegate to represent them in this meeting regardless of if they are in a duplicate situation before the meeting.)
27 April: 19:00 UTC Accepted student proposals announced on the Google Summer of Code 2015 site.

Community Bonding Period: Students get to know mentors, read documentation, get up to speed to begin working on their projects.

25 May: Students begin coding for their Google Summer of Code projects;

Google begins issuing initial student payments provided tax forms are on file and students are in good standing with their communities. Work Period: Mentors give students a helping hand and guidance on their projects.

26 June: 19:00 UTCMentors and students can begin submitting mid-term evaluations.
3 July: 19:00 UTC Mid-term evaluations deadline;

Google begins issuing mid-term student payments provided passing student survey is on file. Work Period: Mentors give students a helping hand and guidance on their projects.

17 August: Suggested 'pencils down' date. Take a week to scrub code, write tests, improve documentation, etc.
21 August: 19:00 UTC Firm 'pencils down' date. Mentors, students and organization administrators can begin submitting final evaluations to Google.
28 August: 19:00 UTC Final evaluation deadline

Google begins issuing student and mentoring organization payments provided forms and evaluations are on file.

28 August: 19:30 UTC Students can begin submitting required code samples to Google
31 August: Final results of Google Summer of Code 2015 announced
25 September: 19:00 UTC "Soft" deadline for student code sample submission. Students who want their t-shirts and certificates in the first wave of shipments must submit their code sample by this date.
6 - 8 November: Mentor Summit at Google: Delegates from each successfully participating organization are invited to Google to greet, collaborate and code. Our mission for the weekend: make the program even better, have fun and make new friends.

Ideas Page

Status : Open for Ideas
Link : ideas.adoc

We encourage students to provide creative yet useful ideas towards the Fedora project as well. Please use Student Idea page to note your idea. The idea will be moved to the original idea page once the idea is picked by a mentor.

Over the past period we have observed that few students tend to submit proposals for their own ideas directly to Google-melange. There will be no communication after then even we ask more info on Google-melange. Such nature of submissions need extra effort when it comes to manage proposals on Google-Melange. Therefore as a policy, proposals for students ideas (with no supporting mentor indicated) that are being submitted directly to Google-melange will be marked Ignore after a 24 hours of warning unless the students does not voluntary withdraw the proposal or explain basis of their idea.
This will not restrict submitting proposals on students ideas, we always welcome novel and innovative ideas from students if they follow the right path. As the first step send us your idea and will start discuss how to manage it. If you have a supporting mentor for your own idea please feel free to submit it directly to Google-melange and clearly note the mentors' contact details.