Gentoo is accepted to GSoC 2017

There was good news in my mailbox today. The Gentoo Foundation was accepted to be a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code 2017!

What this means is we need you as a mentor, backup mentor or expert mentor. Whether you are a Gentoo developer and have done GSoC before does not matter at this point.

A mentor is somebody who will help during the selection of students, and will mentor a student during the summer. This should take at most one hour of your time on weekdays when student actually work on their project. What’s in it for you, you ask? A pretty exclusive Google T-shirt, a minion who does things you wouldn’t have the time or energy to do, but most importantly gratification and a lot of fun.

Backup mentors are for when the primary mentor of a student becomes unavailable for an extended period, typically for medical or family reasons. It rarely happens but it does happen. But a backup mentor can also be an experienced mentor (i.e., have done it at least once) who assists a primary mentor who is doing it for the first time.

Expert mentors have a very specific knowledge and are contacted on an as-needed basis to help with technical decisions.

You can be any combination of all that. However, our immediate need in the coming weeks is for people (again, not necessarily mentors or devs) who will help us evaluate student proposals.

If you’re a student, it’s the right time now to start thinking about what project idea you would want to work on during the summer. You can find ideas on our dedicated page, or you can come up with yours (these are the best!). One note though: you are going to be working on this full-time (i.e., 8 hours a day, we don’t allow for another even part-time job next to GSoC, although we do accommodate students who have a limited amount of classes or exams) for 3 months, so make sure your idea can keep you busy for this long. Whether you pick one of our ideas or come up with yours, it is strongly recommended to start discussing it with us on IRC.

As usual, we’d love to chat with you or answer your questions in #gentoo-soc on Freenode IRC. Make sure you stay long enough in the channel and give us enough time to respond to you. We are all volunteers and can’t maintain a 24/7 presence. It can take up to a few hours for one of us to see your request.