UPDATE 2008-03-11 03:20AM EDT: I re-worked this based on existing text as well as some from last year's application and sent it off. Thanks so much for everyone's hard work!
Hey, folks. Here's the template for the mentoring organization application. We need to fill this out (as well as flesh out our final ideas list) by March 12 at noon PDT/19:00 UTC. This is a wiki page. Go nuts.
And for those who are not members yet, please subscribe to the SoC 2008 group, and if you'd like to be a mentor or help with the administration of the program (and are not planning to apply as a student), the SoC 2008 Mentors group (private).
About Your Organization
1. What is your organization's name?
Drupal
2. What is your organization's home page?
http://drupal.org/
3. Describe your organization.
Drupal is a web content management system and web application framework written in PHP. It is also a vibrant, growing, and fun community of programmers, activists and communicators. The core Drupal software is a framework to power community driven web site software, and includes features such as internationalization, tagging, and an extensive roles and permissions system. The highly extensible architecture supports well over a thousand sub-projects in the form of contributed modules and themes, so there's something here for everyone.
4. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?
GSoC has repeatedly resulted in attracting and retaining some of our most dedicated contributors, and we aim to repeat these successes for yet another year. However, we are also deeply committed to guiding /all/ new developers through their first steps in open source, as demonstrated by our community members' contributions to larger efforts such as the GSoC wiki documentation.
5. Did your organization participate in previous GSoC years? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects. (optional)
Drupal has been involved with GSoC since the beginning. Many of our students have gone on to become immersed in the Drupal community, taking on key roles within the project, working full-time with Drupal development and consulting shops, and/or graduating to GSoC mentors and admins in subsequent years. Our project failure rate has been consistently low, although we have taken steps to reduce this even further by growing our team of administrators, mentors, and other volunteers for 2008.
6. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (optional)
N/A
7. What license does your project use?
GNU General Public License (GPL)
8. URL for your ideas page
http://drupal.org/google-summer-of-code/2008/ideas-list
9. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/development
10. Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?
- #drupal on irc.freenode.net
11. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. (optional)
N/A, although we would like applicants to specify their Drupal.org usernames in their application. Is this possible?
12. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please enter their Google Account address. We will email them to confirm, your organization will not become active until they respond. (optional)
(Rok, Charlie, and Dmitri's e-mail addresses.. Josh, it wouldn't take yours. Is it a Google account? -- Just updated Mentors page with Google Account Josh)
About Your Mentors
1. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
Each of these individuals is a past successful GSoC mentor, a well-known figure in the community, has been met in person by the GSoC administration team, or some combination of all three. Traits we specifically look for in mentors are overall knowledge level, project management skills, demonstrated ability to share information with others, patience and etiquette with newcomers, and availability of time over the summer. We also chose mentors with a wide range of skills, so that we will be prepared to take on a diverse set of projects should the need arise.
2. Who will your mentors be? Please enter their Google Account address separated by commas. If your organization is accepted we will email each mentor to invite them to take part. (optional)
(Insert big glop of e-mail addresses from http://groups.drupal.org/node/9527 ... Greg Heines, Earl Miles, kay_v, mfburgett, and gravetech didn't work... are those Google accounts?)
About The Program
1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
Our first line of defense is a series of preventative measures, including introducing more structure during the "get to know the community" period by having students complete DROP tasks (analogous to GHOP tasks), more promotion of students and their projects throughout the life of GSoC, and a requirement for students to blog weekly about the progress of their GSoC projects. We will also have better tools right at the outset to track CVS commits and website activity, so that we're much better equipped to find disappearing students before they actually disappear.
However, at the first sign of lack of communication, our first recourse will be to talk one-on-one with the individual. Students can be shy, and scared to ask questions for fear of feeling "stupid," and we understand that this happens and will do our best to reach out and encourage them. However, if it becomes a chronic problem, students will be informed that they will not receive mid-term (or final) payments unless the behaviour changes.
2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
We will also require regular check-ins from our GSoC mentors, both to ensure that they feel their student is on track, but also to make sure that they're still out there and actively engaged. Additionally, each GSoC project is assigned a secondary mentor who can field questions and take over in case the primary mentor becomes unavailable. We also have a large body of community members who've signed up to help with more general code reviews and imparting advice about who to contact, what resources to seek, etc. which will help mentors focus on the things that only they can do.
3. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
Before the program, as mentioned above, we have a pool of community members not associated with any particular project who will induct students into community processes such as groups, the issue queue, development list, IRC, CVS, how to create patches, and so on. We will also be introducing the students early on to the DROP program (analogous to GHOP), where they can cut their teeth on some bite-sized tasks before launching into full GSoC mode.
During the program, all GSoC projects will have an official project at drupal.org/project which provides a permanent place for the code to live, as well as an issue queue. This equips them with exactly the same tools as the existing "Drupal rockstars" and also results in free publicity for the projects each time they're used, for the hundreds of people who follow various issue/commit trackers. During the program, we will also have frequent status updates to the community about GSoC's progress, in order to help raise the profile of GSoC projects.
Both during and after the program, we'll start assigning more ownership over things to students; for example, adding them to the documentation team, having them mentor DROP tasks, teach lessons in the Drupal Dojo, etc. This helps further cultivate an investment in the community.
17. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
The biggest thing we can do here is get as many other community members as possible interested and invested in our students' projects, so that students feel a sense of ownership and pride in their work and thus see ongoing maintenance as a joy rather than a chore. Our large body of community members will shift from "intro mode" to "review mode" early on in the GSoC development cycle, to help engage the students.
GSoC experience also goes a long way on a resumé in our community, and we will work with interested students to help them land Drupal jobs after school, and coordinate with industry partners who may want to further invest in these projects after GSoC ends.