The Julia project has been accepted into GSoC 2017!
We can now add mentors to the GSoC app, so if you’re interested in helping to review projects, or in potentially mentoring, please reach out.
Once student proposals are in we will review them collectively, choose which projects we will accept, and organise who is taking on what. We want to make sure that people have projects they are enthusiastic about and aren’t spread too thin, so registering or submitting project ideas now won’t be absolutely binding. In other words, it’s OK to err on the side of doing so even if you’re not certain.
Students – applications open on March 20th. Hopefully you are all busy writing code, polishing proposals and talking to mentors ready for then.
Me, @shashi and @ChrisRackauckas are admins this year, so please feel free to ask any of us questions about the process.
Do candidate-mentors have to register in the Google GSoC application at this stage?
Also, for QML.jl I got a question from a student by email. What’s the policy on communication about project ideas? I was thinking of maybe elaborating the QML.jl ideas in issues tagged with GSOC, that way all students get access to the same information. As a general rule I think it’s best to communicate about the technical side of projects using the standard community tools rather than private email.
It’s broadly up to you how to handle communication, but I suggest keeping both channels open – have initial discussions with students directly and move PRs / technical discussions on to github as appropriate. We’ll also have set up a slack during the projects.
Open source discussions are good to have but tend to be quite limited in terms of individual feedback and mentorship. GSoC is about having a more involved experience than you’d get just contributing to open source normally, so having both sides feel comfortable communicating directly is important. Also, that initial contact is a great way to figure out if a project is a good fit, so the more of that the better.
Students should definitely submit a proposal through the GSoC page. If they aren’t in the system we can’t take them. However, they are also welcome to post in public channels (here, various gitters etc.) for feedback.