Summer of Code 2012/management

Summer of Code 2011 is the 2011 edition of a community program sponsored by Google, allowing students to join the community as developers.

This page focuses on internal management of the program by the 2012 admin for Wikimedia, Sumana Harihareswara.

Timeline
timeline
 * Organisation applications begin February 27.
 * Organisation applications deadline March 9.
 * Student applications begin March 26.
 * Student application deadline is April 6.

GSoC management philosophy
This is where I (Sumana Harihareswara, manager of our participation in GSoC) am placing my thoughts on how we should participate in GSoC this year.

People are more important than code
As Summer of Code Past Projects and MaxSem's quantitative analysis show, we have only an okay track record of nurturing students into continuing members of our community and of merging good code into trunk and deploying it. The merge issues especially bother me because they lead to lessened morale among prospective volunteers and past GSoC students. So:
 * I'm more interested in promising continuing contributors, who are competent at development and passionate about our mission, than about the specifics of their proposals
 * Since the quality of a student's relationship with their mentor is the #1 deciding factor in whether they stay in the community, I'll be aggressively checking on mentor-student relationships throughout the spring and summer

Hands-on mentorship and management
I'm going to be taking quite a hands-on approach to organizational administration this year. I will be selecting mentors based on my judgment of their collaborative and mentoring skills, setting up online meetings among students and among mentor-student pairs, and insisting on early and frequent public communication from students. This is in response to previous suboptimal experiences with students who went silent, or mentors who didn't talk with their students enough, or projects that went astray because the larger development community wasn't engaged with them and so code never got reviewed and merged.

Quality over quantity; scope small
It takes the full Community Bonding Period (and then some) to get used to our processes. And I'd rather people dedicate July 22-August 20 to merging with trunk, pre-deploy review, testing, bugfixing, documentation of course, and other integration work. So we should encourage students to scope for more like 6 weeks than 12. A well-scoped project is a dream to run. Our chant should usually go, "Can you really do that in a summer?"

Include other Wikimedia technologies? Semantic MW?
We could either be fairly inclusive under our GSoC umbrella (mobile applications, bots, Semantic MediaWiki family/bundle, etc.) or limit ourselves to the Wikimedia Foundation's key platform technology (MediaWiki core, and extensions that are developed in Wikimedia communities). This is an open question. Inclusiveness potentially widens the net, but also weakens the organization's ability to strongly brand and market its participation in easy-to-understand pages and language, and splits the GSoC students among various communication channels and codebases, isolating and weakening them.

Don't make Sumana a bottleneck
Sumana is a liaison but please don't make a habit of making her a bottleneck and waiting for her to approve your ideas. A good rule of thumb: use your best judgment in making a decision, and then cc her on the email so she has a chance to speak up.

Documents

 * Summer of Code 2012/management/application
 * Status updates

Communications

 * (none yet on the blog)
 * Various February and March 2012 emails on the wikitech-l mailing list