During the course of your Summer of Code project, you'll not only have to write code, you'll also have to spend some time on reporting the progress of your project, as well as advertising it.

This consists of the following:

  • Send us a weekly report
  • Keep your portfolio page up-to-date
  • (Optionally) Promote your work on your blog

Each of these is described below.

Sending the weekly report

Each week you will have to send a weekly report to the gnome-soc mailing list (gnome-soc-list@gnome.org). This report has to be sent in on Friday or during the course of the weekend, but at the very latest on Sunday, 18:00 UTC. These reports are very important, missing too many of them will lead to exclusion (and thus no money). So make sure you send them in, all in all it shouldn't take longer than 15-20 mins per week. It can also be a good idea to send the report to the mailing list of the project you are working on and your mentor.

A weekly report doesn't have to be long, but it should include the following points:

  • What have I done this week (Describe what you achieved / produced / issues you encountered etc)

  • What will I do next week? (Try to give an estimate on what you will produce during the next week)

  • Looking back on the previous report, how accurate was your planning? (Compare the work done with the planned work, describe why you managed to do much more / less than planned).

  • What problems did you have? What cool things did you discover that can be helpful to others? A git log? Anything you think is interesting to the rest.

Use a clear title with your project name and the number of the report, for example: F-Spot: Sidebar improvements: Weekly Report 01. While this status report can also be used as blog material, please copy and paste the blog entry you made in your report instead of just putting a link to a blog entry. A git shortlog of your activity and the URL of your code repository would also be really useful for the people writing the GNOME commit digest.

Use the following schedule for sending your reports:

  • Friday May 27: Weekly Report 01
  • Friday June 03: Weekly Report 02
  • Friday June 10: Weekly Report 03
  • Friday June 17: Weekly Report 04
  • Friday June 24: Weekly Report 05
  • Friday July 01: Weekly Report 06
  • Friday July 08: Weekly Report 07
  • Friday July 15: Weekly Report 08
  • Friday July 22: Weekly Report 09
  • Friday July 29: Weekly Report 10
  • Friday August 05: Weekly Report 11
  • Friday August 12: Weekly Report 12

As always, contact the admins if there are difficulties with this.

Keep your portfolio page up-to-date

Besides the weekly reports, you'll also have to maintain a wiki page with all the information about your project. This should be one page with all the necessary information about your project, for those people that want to know more about it. Keeping your portfolio up-to-date is also an important requirement!

Include the following:

  • A description of your project
  • Where to find the code and how to test it
  • Anything important you have made

  • Links to e.g. blogposts / weekly reports (see http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-soc-list/) etc

  • Anything else that might be valuable.

The goal of this page is to inform people about your project (the link you give them if they want to know more) and to make sure that all the information about it will still be available after the summer. At certain times during the summer we might ask to add additional information, such as your midterm goals. An example of such a page can be found here: Example portfolio.

A placeholder for each project has been made here, add your page on the page of your name: Student Projects

Promote your work on your blog

If you have a blog, try to spend some time promoting your project. Don't just copy/paste your weekly reports in there, try to make it interesting for your readers, for example by adding screenshots. Also link to your portfolio page for those readers that want more information. All of this is optional, but it can help getting good feedback and getting people interested in your work. If your blog is not on Planet GNOME yet, contact the admins.

Outreach/SummerOfCode/2011/Reporting (last edited 2013-12-03 18:33:32 by WilliamJonMcCann)