Interview of Daniel Siegel by Karen Sandler
How has the Google Summer of Code program at GNOME developed in the past two years?
It's been very nice to see the whole program evolve over time. While the first rounds were quite chaotic, we have gained experience and hopefully are doing things better now. Also, there are a good deal more students interested in joining the Summer of Code program. As we only have limited seats available it can be very hard to pick the right students in each round. To ease this problem we require all applying students to provide a solution to a non-trivial bug for a GNOME module. We also try hard to maintain a list of possible student projects which we really like. This makes it easier for students to focus on one or two applications and to provide a really good application.
During the summer each student maintains a wiki page where they provide information about their progress, code and weekly reports. This is very helpful for them and others who are interested in a specific student project, but also for future reference. We also want to have the students come to GUADEC to meet the GNOME community in person and to present their projects. For this reason we are giving Summer of Code Lightning Talks where each student has the chance to present their project to a large audience.
Furthermore I really like the success of the GNOME Women's Outreach Program, which is currently in its third round. It is a brilliant project mostly lead by Marina Zhurakhinskaya which focuses on getting women in Free and Open Source software projects. If you have visited a GNOME conference, you can see how the program has already paid off, which is encouraging.
Lastly we sat down during the last Desktop Summit to discuss how we can share material and effort between the Summer of Code and the Women's Outreach Program. I really want to thank Marina Zhurakhinskaya, SÃlvia Miranda, Ruben Vermeersch and Diego Escalante Urrelo for their outlay to improve the two programs and bring them together under the umbrella of the GNOME Outreach Program.
What do you think the most challenging part of being a mentor is?
I think to constantly be able to motivate one's student. You know, most of the mentors have a job or are students themselves, so their time is often limited. On the other hand a student really needs their mentors time and guidance. Therefore I really admire mentors who are able to positively influence the student's passion for their project and the desire to become involved in other areas of the GNOME project.
Are GNOME hackers good mentors?
Of course they are, as every mentor is willing to spend time and energy for their student. In most cases a good mentor is the maintainer of the project or a person with a great insight of the happenings inside a module. But the most important thing of being a good mentor is time, dedication and a willingness to help a student to finish their project successfully.
If you are interested in becoming a better mentor, I strongly suggest reading Federico Mena-Quintero's mentoring howto: http://people.gnome.org/~federico/docs/summer-of-code-mentoring-howto/
What do you think the biggest successes of GNOME's participation in summer of code the past two years are?
In my opinion the biggest success is to see a student getting deeply involved in the project. When I see previous students attending conferences for several years, finding friends in the project and occupying an important role in the project, those are the moments where I feel that the mentors and administrators did a good job. And of course it is always great to see the students projects merged and become an integral part of GNOME.
How can we improve?
The two problems we are facing are unmerged code and disappearing students after the summer. We are getting better each year but it is tedious work and often you can't do much due to personal or technical reasons. This can be very unfortunate for us.
But fortunately we can improve. We can make sure the student projects are relevant, manageable, and the code can be landed incrementally during the summer. This will lead to a higher motivation and a higher probability of merged code. Then we will try to encourage students to connect to possible mentors well ahead of the Google Summer of Code application deadline, in order to make contributions specifically to the project they are applying for, and develop a project proposal with a mentor.
What would you like to see in the next Google Summer of Code round?
A better integration of the students into the community can have a huge impact on the motivation of students and mentors. Since 2010 we have had a dinner during GUADEC where the students can meet other students and members of the community. Next year we are planning to improve this by providing several ways to quickly get to know to key figures and other members of the community.
I love your instructional videos! Are there any new videos or tutorials in the works?
Thank you! At some point I stopped doing new tutorials, as stable bindings for advanced GNOME technologies weren't available at that time and it wouldn't make much sense to force people to compile the bindings themselves. But sure, if people like them I will certainly do another series.
Which of the ones you've done have been the most successful or popular?
They were all much more successful than I ever imagined and I want to thank everyone for all the positive feedback I received. As all went into quite different directions I can't really tell which one is the most popular but people seemed to like some interactivity and multimedia, such as the video player, the guitar tuner and the photo viewer.
Where was the Traveling Gnome, really??
It is rumored to have joined the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally, some really great GNOME hackers post the whereabouts on https://live.gnome.org/TravellingGnome