CiviCRM Accepted as Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Mentoring Organization

We did it! Now what?

Unfortunately we can't just sit back and wait for the student project proposals to roll in. If you look at the list of 190 organizations Google approved, we're competing w/ projects with a lot more name recognition...

• Twitter (https://github.com/twitter/twitter.github.com/wiki/Google-Summer-of-Code-2014)
• Wikimedia (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2014)
• Mozilla (https://wiki.mozilla.org/Community:SummerOfCode14)
• Tor (https://www.torproject.org/about/gsoc.html.en)

Google expects to approve ~1,300 students this year. If evenly distributed, each project would get 6 student slots… but Google doesn't evenly divide the slots. Some projects will get 20 slots ($100,000 for students $10,000 for the organization) and others will get 1 ($5,000 for the student and $500 for the organization).

No one knows exactly how Google decides how many slots to give each project, but there is a relationship between the number of project proposals an organizations gets and how many slots they get.

Student can start applying in < 2 weeks which why I've been asking people to put so much effort into the Project Ideas Wiki before CiviCRM was even accepted. The number of slots we get will depend largely on our ability as a community to recruit students. Google puts a lot of effort into promoting GSoC in computer science programs around the world, but we need students to actually spend 2-5 hours writing up a full project proposal for a specific CiviCRM project.

A full project proposal may or may not be based on one of the existing project ideas. These are some examples of full project proposals from pervious GSoC project from other organizations:

• Derivates API for Drupal (2011)
• Module and Theme Browser for Drupal (2011)
• Improving RESTful Web Services for Drupal (2012)
• Realtime Collaboration on Visual Editor for WikiMedia (2012)
• JReport: A java wrapper of the Open311 API for Code for America (2012)
• Enhance Profiles.WordPress.org (2012)

There are likely a lot of questions from people and organizations who've already agreed to volunteer as mentors and co-mentors about how we get from project ideas -> full project proposals and how we can get closer to 20 project slots than 1 project slot... as well as from developers and organizations who were waiting to see if CiviCRM was accepted before investing any time in the program.

Can I or my organization still get involved?

Yes. Students can't submit full project applications until March 10, but time is running out.

Rather than try to answer everyone's questions as blog and wiki posts that are too long for anyone to read (tl;dr), I'm going to host 2 Google Hangouts:

• 8PM Pacfic Thursday, Feb 27 (what time is that for me?)
• 9AM Pacific Thursday, March 6 (what time is that for me?)

I've also proposed a GSoC session for CiviCon. The timing of CiviCon couldn't be better since the official list of accepted projects will be announced a few days before that on April 21. That is also the beginning of what Google calls the Community Bonding period. This is when students get to know mentors, read documentation, get up to speed to begin working on their projects. The Google Hangouts will focus specifically on what we can do as a community between now and the student application deadline on March 21 to take full advantage of the Google Summer of Code program. As such I'm only planning on talking for 15 minutes and spending another 30-45 minutes answering questions and helping people get involved.