[Koha-devel] GSoC?

[Galen Charlton]

Hi,

Following up on some discussion on #koha, I'd like to raise the
question of whether we want to consider putting in an application for
the Google Summer of Code [1] this year.

What's GSoC?  Very briefly, it's effectively an internship program
where Google will pay college and university students to work on F/OSS
projects.  One of the overall goals is to help educate students, both
in the technical matters of contributing software to a real project
and the social matters of interacting productively with an open source
community.  Ideally, a GSoC student would end their experience ready
and willing to continue to participate in F/OSS projects.

Secondarily, we may get some cool and useful code to add to Koha.

If Koha were to apply, we would be expected to provide the following:

- a list of project ideas that would be beneficial to Koha and
educational for the students
- mentors willing to devote a fair amount of time between June and
September guiding students through their projects
- an "organization admin" or two to help the mentors and students

Being a mentor is a serious commitment.  The ideal mentor would be an
active developer, familiar with the codebase and expert in at least
some of it, willing to teach, willing to help make sure that student
participates openly in the community, and able to devote a fair amount
of time to work with his or her student during the summer.

I encourage folks to read the GSoC document carefully, then answer the
following questions:

- Is GSoC something we want to participate in?
- If so, are there enough folks willing and able to act as mentors?

[1] http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2013

Regards,

Galen
--
Galen Charlton
Manager of Implementation
Equinox Software, Inc. / The Open Source Experts
email:  gmc at esilibrary.com
direct: +1 770-709-5581
cell:   +1 404-984-4366
skype:  gmcharlt
web:    http://www.esilibrary.com/
Supporting Koha and Evergreen: http://koha-community.org &
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