There will shortly be a number of students approaching the ASF looking
for GSoC style mentoring. The number can be anything from 0 to 200. I'm
expecting it to be 10-20 in reality (their tutors don't feel that many
will have the confidence to approach the ASF).
I will be the main contact point on behalf of ComDev, naturally I hope
people here will help out within their own projects and if possible
within ComDev too.
I propose to send the following email to PMCs in a couple of days to
make them aware of what this is all about and what mentors are expected
to do. I'd appreciate any comments/clarifications before I send it out.
SUBJECT: New mentoring activities
Over the next few weeks your project may be approached by students
participating in a European Commission funded project called OpenSE.
These students will be looking for GSoC style mentors in open source
projects.
The headline info you need is:
* Mentors will not need to commit as much time as they do to GSoC
* The student/mentor relationship should be largely the same as any
other relationship with someone new to your project
* Students will, in general, work on existing issues in your project,
but some may come with their own ideas
* All work by the student should be managed and recorded using your
projects normal workflow
* Students will not be full time on the project
* Students will not be paid
* Students will have external support from teachers
The key message for your project community is that this activity should
present minimal additional overhead to your normal community support
activities. However, there are a few additional, but small, tasks we ask
you to perform during the course of a mentored project:
* acknowledge your agreement to mentor a student
* provide a brief evaluation of the students activities half way through
the project cycle (around 6 weeks in most cases)
* provide a brief evaluation of the students activities at the end of
the project cycle (around 12 weeks in most cases)
Each of these activities is recorded in a JIRA issue in the ComDev
project. This issue will be created by the student during the
application process.
It is important to stress that we are not asking mentors to take any
responsibility for the success of the students work. All we ask is that
you act as a "friendly face" within your community and provide brief
evaluations as described above.
Unlike in GSoC these students will (in most cases) be doing this work as
part of their formal education and will have external tutors and
teaching assistants helping them. They will not be paid for their
activities.
Unlike in GSoC students will not be working full time on their projects
and thus the overhead on mentors will be considerably less.
The Community Development project is encouraging and supporting this
activity in an attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of this approach to
helping students understand open source development whilst bringing some
valued patches to our projects.
You can find some more information about the mentoring programme (which
will evolve in response to experiences and feedback in this experiment)
at http://community.apache.org/mentoringprogramme.html
If you have any questions please mail dev@community.apache.org
If you agree to mentor a student I, or someone from the ComDev team,
will ensure you are kept informed of activities as they progress.
Ross
On behalf of the Community Development Project
