-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Would you like to mentor a student paid to contribute to your package? Date: Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:56:31 -0400 From: Richard Stallman rms@gnu.org To: gnu-prog@gnu.org

The GNU Project is participating in Google's Summer of Code program. (See http://code.google.com/soc/mentorfaq.html for details.) In summary:

* Summer of Code 2006 is a program that offers student developers stipends to work on development of free software.

* The FSF will be paid $500 per project, too.

* We need people to volunteer to mentor these students, and also people to evaluate other ideas that students may suggest.

* Payment to the student is contingent upon feedback by the mentor.

* There is no requirement that the finished code be included in the package itself, but goal is to get code we want to use.

* For FSF-copyrighted GNU packages, we will ask the student to sign the usual copyright assignment before getting paid, to make sure there will be no legal obstacle to using his code.

If you are willing to mentor one or more projects, this could be of great use to the GNU Project -- it would introduce new volunteers to your package's code base, get a little funds for the FSF, and enhance the GNU operating system.

Before you volunteer to be a mentor, please make sure you can actually spare the time to do the work; having mentors become unresponsive or drop out would be very bad. It is important for projects to be feasible for a good student-level hacker to do in 2 or 3 months; nothing super large.

It is ok if you talk with student candidates that you already know are capable, to plan projects with them. That is a good way to produce projects that are really likely to get done, and done well.

To volunteer as a mentor, please send email to summer-of-code@gnu.org. Please describe the student projects you offer to mentor, and for each one, say which GNU package it will enhance.

We need to find a "backup mentor" for each project; the backup mentor is someone who will take over in case you become busy, sick, or otherwise unavailable. If you can think of any obvious suggestions for backup mentors for your projects, please mention the suggestions in your mail. (We consider these suggestions are tentative, so you can mention them first, then ask them if they are available.) But if you can't think of anyone, please suggest your project anyway. We will look for a suitable backup mentor.

James Youngman jay@gnu.org will be taking care of accumulating the offers and putting them in our web site, but he could use one or two people to help. If you are willing to help, please write to summer-of-code@gnu.org.

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