I'm going to quickly outline the expectations for mentors for
BeagleBoard.org's Google Summer of Code 2013, then dive into some
details on those expectations and what is required to complete them.
1. Sign up on Melange no later than tomorrow (Friday).
2. Join beagleboard-gsoc@googlegroups.com mailing list.
3. Be prepared to spend about 10 hours per week mentoring your student.
4. Review any application you'd be interested in supporting no later
than tomorrow and provide guidance to the students on what
contributions would be the most valuable in your eyes.
5. Join or have an alternate mentor join in your place the weekly G+
hangout on Wednesdays at 14:00 UTC (7AM US Pacific, 10AM US Eastern,
16:00 Germany, 19:30 India).
6. Provide on-going positive criticism and guidance to your student
multiple times a week.
7. Be prepared to reproduce the work of the student on a regular basis
such that we know we are getting something useful out of the student
and make sure the student understands how to make this easy on you.
8. Get confirmed contact with me immediately if your student is
blocked or you can't determine her/his status.
9. Socialize with the students and let me know clearly with which ones
you interact well.
Expanded guidance:
1. To get signed up on Melange, you need to visit [1] and select
"Start Connection" near the top of the screen. Currently, I have
signed up as mentors:
* Greg K-H
* Koen Kooi
* Andrew Bradford
* Tom King
* Vladimir P
* Pantelis A
* Kees J
* Frans M
* Luis Gustavo Lira
* Hunyue Yau
* Matt Ranostay
[1] https://google-melange.appspot.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2013/beagle
2. The sign-up for the beagleboard-gsoc is at [2]. All future GSoC
messages should be sent there when addressing both students and
mentors.
[2] Google Groups
3. The 10 hours thing is just a guideline. Ideally, this would
overlap something you'd like to contribute already, so this wouldn't
be a total time drain. My past experience is that this can be *very*
fun. It goes by pretty quickly too. The guidelines provided by
Google are at [3]. I'm going to limit our slots such that we have 2
backup mentors for every primary mentor. Right now, that looks like I
might take at most 4 slots. That should mean you should have a good
amount of backup when you have emergencies, but if you aren't serious
about trying, please remove yourself from the list.
[3] http://en.flossmanuals.net/GSoCMentoring/what-makes-a-good-mentor/
4. Student applications are due tomorrow. While we might have a
chance to help them clean it up before they start execution, we won't
have time to get back to them to find out more about how well they can
organize a plan of attack. Please help me inundate them with feedback
immediately. I'll be jumping on that as well as soon as I hit SEND.
After the deadline hits mid-day tomorrow, I'll be looking for some
ratings using the Melange site (yes, it is a pain in the ass) over the
weekend such that we know who are top applicants are.
5. I'm open to alternative suggestions to the G+ hangout, including an
IRC meeting, but regular meetings are important to make sure both the
students and mentors are accountable. If there is any consensus on
the meeting format or time, I'll switch to that, but I have to assume
there won't be consensus and simply make a call.
6. Please stay positive. There is no benefit to berating the
students. If they don't do the job, you can fail them and that is the
only negativity necessary. We want them to pass and contribute
something from which we can all benefit. Beating them up will only
slow them down.
7. If you can't reproduce the student work easily, no one will. If it
waits until the final weeks, the project will be a non-starter. Look
to have a milestone very early in the project that will enable you to
easily track the student's progress from that point forward. Make the
student write the test bench, if necessary, and don't approve the
project if they don't have a believable plan on how to test and how to
enable you to test their work.
8. I will send out an e-mail to all mentors with my phone number. If
you ping me on IRC or by e-mail, ping me again or call me until you've
actually *heard back* from me that I am aware there is an issue.
Please don't let issues drag for multiple days. The weekly meetings
are there to make sure these things don't drag on, but I know there
are times that the issue might slip through the weekly meeting time
without being noticed.
9. Please, please, please don't let me approve a student with whom
you'll spend your whole time arguing. Chat with them *now* to make
sure your personalities are reasonably compatible. Many of the
students have posted e-mails to beagleboard-gsoc@googlegroups.com and
are frequently on #beagle or #beagle-gsoc. Engage with them
technically and/or socially, but *engage* with them.
Boards will ship out early next week as soon as I have a fair idea
what projects we'll want to get approved. Please let me know if your
students need anything other than a BeagleBone Black. Having someone
bring the BeagleBoard/BeagleBoard-xM image up to par with the
BeagleBone images would be a wonderful thing to me.
Best regards,
Jason Kridner
BeagleBoard.org GSoC administrator
Bcc: Cathy Wicks, backup administrator