Google Summer of Code is an amazing opportunity. First, it is a great opportunity to interact with two of open source’s finest Leslie Hawthorn and Chris DiBona. Their whole team of Googlers is amazing. But more important is the opportunity to enable university students to spend their summer of working on open source projects, mostly WordPress in our case, and for the students to make a little coin in the process.

Last year was our first year participated in Google Summer of Code. Overall, I think our participation was a great success with 10 students getting experience working on open source software. Five of them are still active in the WordPress world. I think we can do much better this year.

Thanks to my friend Ronald Heft Jr’s reminder to wp-hackers that it GSoC was about to start, we are already ahead of where we were last year. If WordPress is accepted, Ronald plans on applying again as a student, and another regular participant, Jacob Santos, also has been sharing project proposals on the wp-hackers mailing list.

Matt and I sat down — virtually, of course — and reflected on the good results from last year, and the awesome opportunities for everyone involved to have an even better experience this year.

The Automattic family has grown, and through my gentle persuasion, we have more mentors. We also have two more community members more than last year. Some of these WordPress aficionados will be co-mentors or backup mentors, so that the students benefit from more, direct collaboration. Matt will also be acting as a meta-mentor, a mentor’s mentor. You can see a lot of the other details that we came up with in our application below.

Another exciting development is another organization that greatly contributes to and benefits from WordPress will be using company time to mentor students, b5media. Aaron Brazell, Mark Jaquith, and Brian Layman (all familar names to WordPress participants) have proposed Integrated Caching Solutions with Mark and Brian co-mentoring.

Does your organization get a lot out of WordPress? It’s not too late to contact me about members of your team getting more out of the open source experiencing by mentoring as part of WordPress’ application to Google Summer of Code.

Here is the application that I submitted:

About Your Organization

3. Describe your organization.

WordPress is the most popular open source “state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform” (blogging software).

Matt Mullenweg and fellow WordPress developers founded Automattic to be able to work on WordPress full-time, provide a WordPress.com service, and other open source software products and services. I am employed by Automattic.

4. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2007? What do you hope to gain by participating?

Why: Google provides this awesome opportunity for students to get paid to work on open source. WordPress is a huge open source success story. Students should have the opportunity to work on WordPress!

What: an opportunity for current student contributors to be able to focus on WordPress this summer, but mostly for new contributors to WordPress to get exposure to open source development, and our mentors having awesome experiences.

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)

This is an important question. We participated for the first time last year, and we have identified a number of ways that we will make it even better:
* Have an application template. Last year we took for granted what was essential for a successful application.
* Applicants must also post their application on a WordPress powered blog. Last year we had quite a few applicants without basic understanding of WordPress.
* More mentors, having backup mentors, and a mentor’s mentor. No mentor will be allowed to take on more than 1 project no matter how much they are passionate about multiple projects.
* Mentors having to provide status updates as well every 2nd week (students every week)
* As students reach the major milestones of their project that they share their progress on the main community (mailing) lists and other communication channels.
* We will require mentors to be very specific about what will be required for full student payment at the half way mark and the end. So no disappointment by either mentors or students.

7. What license does your project use?

GPL v2

8. URL for your ideas page

http://codex.wordpress.org/GSoC2008

9. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

wp-hackers

10. Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?

#wordpress-dev 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)

http://codex.wordpress.org/GSoC_2008_Application_Template

About Your Mentors

1. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

Volunteered, consistent, pleasant, and knowledgeable.

About The Program

1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Regular checking in to see how they are doing. Once someone “disappears” there is little to be done, but encourage them to come back. No students “dissappeared” last year.

2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Regular checking in to see how they are doing. If a mentor “disappears”, myself or someone else will step in. This is specifically one of the reasons that we have backup/co-mentors mentors and a mentor’s mentor this year.

3. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project’s community before, during and after the program?

A big part of my job, and life is encouraging and supporting participation. WordPress itself is a tool for participation.

We regularly have a variety of activities, so people with different skills can participate.

Still, this year we’ve identified a number of ways to improve from last year including:
* Encourage applicants to blog their proposal and get feedback from wp-hackers mailing list.
* Mentors having to provide status updates as well every 2nd week (students every week). This should enrich the students experience.
* Encourage students to at least always idle in the #wordpress-dev . We heard about this great suggesting from last year’s GSoC podcast.
* Encourage mentors to have voice conversations over Skype or GTalk as a final step in the application process and during the program.
* As students reach the major milestones of their project that they share their progress on the main community (mailing) lists and other communication channels.
* We will require mentors to be very specific about what will be required for full student payment at the half way mark and the end. This will help limit disappointment of both mentors and students. This will help them and their mentors articulate their successes to the community.

4. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

Ensure? After concludes? We are a dynamic, passionate community of participates. We will be there to support and encourage the students, but a student has a lot of demands on them, and outside of this program, we appreciate if our project is not a priority.

Having said that, 5 of our ten participants from last year are still involved, and we want to exceed 50% this year!

I’ll let you know if our application is accepted.