the call for ideas mail
Hiya GNOME lovers! It's that time of the year again: Google's Summer of Code is approaching. We are in the midst of preparing it all [1] but we need your help by submitting great project ideas. Student proposals will start to roll in on March 29, but we'd like to make sure there are plenty of projects from them to choose from and have mentors ready to volunteer their time. So what should you do? Please visit [2] and enter your project ideas under the "New Untriaged Ideas" section. A committee will be formed up later to triage the ideas prior to the opening of the proposal period. If you would like to volunteer your time to mentor but don't have a project idea, surf over and claim one. Mentoring is an awesome way to get more involved with the community and introduce someone to it. If you would like to throw your hat in the ring for the triaging or selection committees and other GSoC related tasks, pop on over to #soc-admin, join the soc-mentors-list and let one of the administrators for the program know you want to be involved in making GNOME rock. This year's administrators are Ruben Vermeersch, Christophe Fergeau and Daniel Siegel (and Sandy Armstrong, for as long as his time doesn't get stolen by the upcoming kid :-)) Cheers, The GNOME Google Summer of Code Administrators [1] http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2010 [2] http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2010/Ideas
the last call for ideas mail
Howdy, On Sunday a small group of SoC mentors will sort through the list of ideas on the wiki, clean them up, remove those we don't want to recommend to students, and highlight those we find especially alluring. If you have ideas for your project, you have today and tomorrow to add them to the wiki before our meeting. Please place new ideas in the "Other Ideas" section: http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2010/Ideas#Other_Ideas The student proposal period starts Monday. If you want to help review student proposals, please sign up as a mentor. If you don't use your full name and include details when applying to be a mentor, we may not know who you are, so if you choose to do that please email me, Ruben, or Daniel with your link_id so we don't reject you. :-) We have to be careful because there are some sneaky or confused students out there who try to sign up as mentors. The ideas page will be under tight control after our meeting on Sunday, but it will still be possible to add ideas if you check with folks in #soc-admin or on the GNOME soc-mentors-list first. Thanks for your time, Sandy
the better luck next time mail
Dear student, Unfortunately, your proposal has not been accepted as a Google Summer of Code 2010 for the GNOME project. We are as much disappointed as you because there were a lot of very good applications this year, much more than the number of slots allowed to us by Google. While there was a few unsatisfactory applications, most of them were well crafted and it was hard for us to dismiss them. Usually, there were only one or two little details missing. Thanks a lot for your proposal. We are very honored that you took the time to submit a proposal to make the GNOME desktop better. You know what ? There's no need to be a SoC student to make great contributions. Even if another student got chosen to work on the project you're most interested in, you can still help! Join the project mailing list [1] and post your thoughts and ideas. Try out patches, write bug reports, and submit your own patches. Join the project's IRC channel and chat with other developers and users. Every project appreciates and respects new contributors! If you're just looking to get started with GNOME development, check out the GNOME Love project [2]. Its whole purpose is to help people get on their feet in the GNOME community. There is a mailing list, an IRC channel, and a huge list of bugs [3] that would be good for first timers to work on. A lot of friendly GNOME developers hang out in #gnome-love just waiting to help out a future contributor. And if you're feeling unsure about putting yourself out there, don't hesitate to contact any of us privately. You might want to start with the developer who would have mentored your project, or with the maintainer of the software you're most interested in. Again, thanks for showing an interest in working with the GNOME community. Keep up the good ideas, good luck with school, and we hope to see you around soon (at worst for SoC 2011)! Take care, The GNOME SoC Team [1] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/ [2] http://live.gnome.org/GnomeLove [3] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/reports/gnome-love.cgi
the you did it mail
Dear GNOME-lovers, Congratulations: you did it! The GNOME community is glad to welcome you, and to have you participate in the Google Summer of Code and work on GNOME-related stuff! Some of you already know the GNOME community quite well, but it might not be the case for everyone of you. That's not a problem: SoC has a community bonding time, where you will have a few weeks to get to know the community before starting the real work. That's a really good thing, and we hope you'll be able to see how great, friendly and helpful the GNOME community is! The first thing we want you to do is to contact your mentor. Write him a nice mail or buy him a beer (or some juice) if you happen to live in the same city :-) If during the SoC, you have a problem with your mentor (lack of communication, or misunderstandings, or deep disagreements, or anything else), don't hesitate to report that to the GNOME administrators (Sandy, Ruben, Christophe, and Daniel): they'll be there to help with this kind of things and their goal is to make sure that you feel good, so they will work hard to fix any issue with your mentor. But hopefully, this won't be needed: all mentors and administrators are nice people (or at least, they're supposed to be ;-)). After sending a mail to your mentor, you should go subscribe to our mailing list for the Summer of Code: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-soc-list Feel free to use this list for discussion between all mentored students, or to ask questions about GNOME, or about the community or about anything you need. We'll check next week if you're all subscribed since this is the list where mails will be sent when we need to reach all of you. It's also the list that you will use for your status reports. To begin things, it would be great that you send to this list an introduction mail so that the whole community knows about you, your project, your plans, etc. Another list that might be of interest to you is the gnome-love mailing list: http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-love That's also a good place to start asking questions if you have problems with building GNOME, or if you're not sure how to do something. There's also an IRC channel for SoC and GNOME: #soc on GIMPNet (irc.gnome.org). Feel free to join it and chat there. You can also join #gnome-hackers where most GNOME people are, and other channels that might be of interest to you. See this page for more information: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeIrcChannels If you prefer to use an address different from your gmail (or google account) address to communicate, please tell the administrators. They'll make a note about it somewhere. Also, if you have a blog, we'd love to know the URL and get a hackergotchi for you :-) That's all for now. If you have any questions, feel free to send a mail to the administrators or the mailing lists, or ask your mentor. Small summary: + make sure you're in contact with your mentor(s) + subscribe to the gnome-soc-list mailing list + introduce yourself to the community + (optional) subscribe to the gnome-love mailing list + (optional) start using IRC + (optional) send your blog information and a hackergotchi to the administrators Welcome and Congratulations!
Start reporting email
Dear students, Great news! The summer is about to start, it's time for coding! Like last years, you will have to send us a weekly report about your activities. You'll also have to maintain a wiki page with all the details of your project. All details about this can be found here: http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2010/Reporting Please read that page very carefully, if you do not follow the guidelines there, we will have to fail you for the project. All in all it should not take much time, just make a habit out of it. The first report is due Friday May 28. Do not hesistate to contact us if you have any problems or questions. Best of luck and enjoy, now is when the fun begins! Yours truly, the admins.