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Date: Thu, 10 Mar 2011 13:58:25 -0800
From: Kathey Marsden <kmarsdenderby@sbcglobal.net>
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Subject: Derby GSoc 2011
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Hello Students and potential mentors for GSoc,

I won't be a formal mentor this year for the first time in many but 
instead am going to offer backup for Tiago with the test and fix project 
DERBY-5091,  but wanted offer some  thoughts based on my experience in 
past years.

For students:

1) Critical to success and acceptance in GSoC in Derby  is  that the 
student have some experience in the community. Get your build and test 
environment set up and fix an issue or two so the mentors understand how 
you can work with the community and what tasks are appropriate.

2) You are absolutely going to need to have a mentor interested in the 
project you are proposing. If you look at the ranking process [1]  , you 
will see that the first step is for mentors to flag proposals they are 
willing to mentor.  Proposals that are not picked up by a mentor, no 
matter how good they are do not go to the next step.   We have three 
issues now labeled gsoc2011 ideas [2],  but so far just one mentor 
volunteer for DERBY-5091.  Unless you can find someone to mentor the 
others your proposal will sit.

3)  There is nothing wrong with having competing proposals for the the 
same project. DERBY-5091 Derby Test and Fix, for example,  is extremely 
broad and could have multiple very diverse proposals.

4) Don't restrict yourself to the labeled ideas.  If you look at the 
issue assignments and you see an area  where you think you could really 
help out the person assigned on something important to them, you might 
be able to convince them to mentor. This is what happened with me last 
year, I planned not to mentor but Tiago put in a proposal for DERBY-728 
which was on my list anyway.

5) Look at the ranking process [1]  and make sure your proposal includes 
all the aspects looked at there. GSoC can get competitive both within 
and between projects.

For potential mentors:

1) Please volunteer to mentor and try to think of projects that are on 
your list anyway where you might consider mentoring instead of doing it 
yourself. It will grow the community and is lots of fun!   Especially 
quality projects I think are appropriate,  like code coverage and 
analysis, more thread interrupt testing, completing the JDBC4.1 testing 
items etc.

2) If you just don't have bandwidth,  thinking  about teaming up as 
Tiago and I plan to. This way vacations can be covered and experienced 
mentors can help bring in the new generation.   Are there mentors from 
previous years that would be willing to support someone else as formal 
mentor?

Thanks

Kathey
[1] http://community.apache.org/mentee-ranking-process.html
[2] 
https://issues.apache.org/jira/sr/jira.issueviews:searchrequest-printable/temp/SearchRequest.html?jqlQuery=labels+%3D+GSOC2011+AND+project+%3D+Derby&tempMax=1000