2025-09-26 –, Auditorium B032 (80)
GCC has participated in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program since 2006 (with one year gap) but for a long time we have not shared experiences, best practices and ideas for improvements in some organized form among the mentors and GSoC "org-admins." The idea of this BoF is to do exactly that.
We may focus on the following bullet points as well as anything that comes up during the BoF.
Better selection of candidates. It occasionally happens that a selected GSoC contributor needs too much hand-holding from their mentor(s) which can lead to decreased willingness of mentors to participate in the program in next years or their outright burn-out.
Make contributors engage with the community more. Often it feels that that accepted contributors are unwilling to ask questions on the mailing list and either communicate just with their mentor(s) in private emails or wait until their next meeting. This slows projects down and puts the entire guidance burden on the mentor(s) where community would often be able to help.
We might want to coordinate more when it comes to evaluations, outlining at least some common criteria for these. In fact, we may want to be stricter and fail more projects.
We should talk about anything that makes mentoring easier and more fun.
We should try to retain more contributors as long(er) term contributors to GCC. While we have gained a few important long-term community members through the program and some folk stick around for a few months, we should probably try to retain more.
IPA reviewer. Author of IPA-CP, IPA-SRA, tree-SRA and some related stuff. GCC GSoC org-admin.