Contributing Guide for Students

Getting Started Early

Experience shows that the best thing to help your application is to contact the organization you want to work with early. For this you can introduce yourself on the mailing list of the organization, or perhaps fix a small bug. The opensource guide has a good introduction how to start contributing to open source projects.

Am I experienced enough?

The answer is generally: Yes. We value creativity, intelligence and enthusiasm above specific knowledge of the libraries or algorithms we use. We think that an interested and motivated student who is willing to learn is more valuable than anything else. The range of available projects should suit people with different backgrounds. At the same time if you have experience using your project of choice or one of it's dependencies (e.g., language) make sure to let us know about that as well. The GSoC Guide gives a good overview of this part for GSoC.

Our Expectations From Students

During the application phase

The tips listed here can help your application. They are not required

Organizations usually favor students that show regular communication with possible mentors / organization until Google announces the accepted projects.

Establishing regular communication is good for 2 reasons. It shows that you are a reliable student and that you have good communication skills. Good communication skills are an important part of GSoC since a student and mentor can rarely meet in person.

When we evaluate an application we use the following point system to get a baseline comparison of students. We are listing those points to help you successfully apply and not missing an obvious point. You can always do more, but please check those points. We will be fair, we promise. You can always ask us and we will help you.

5pts Have you communicated with the organization's mentors?
5pts Have you communicated with the community?
5pts Did you reference projects you coded WITH links to repos or provided code?
5pts Did you provide several methods to contact you? (email, skype, mobile/phone, twitter, chat, and/or tumblr if available)
3pts Did you include a preliminary project plan (before, during, after GSoC)?
3pts Did you state which project you are applying for and why you think you will end up completing the project?
3pts Do you have time for GSoC? This is a paid job! State that you have time in your motivation letter, and list other commitments!
1pts Did you add a link to ALL your application files to a cloud hoster like GitHub or Dropbox? (easy points! 😉)
0pts Be honest! Only universal Karma points. 🙂
5pts Did you create a pull request on the existing code?
5pts Did you continue communication until accepted students are announced?

During the summer

The items here are a requirement for students during the summer

Communication

Write a short report for us every second week in a blog
Commit early and commit often! Push to a public repository (e.g., GitHub) so that we can see and review your work.
Actively work on our project timeline and communicate with us during the community bonding period.
Communicate every working day with your mentor, preferably in public using the standard channels of your project.
If there is a reason why you can't work or can't contact us on a regular basis please make us aware of this in advance.
If you don't communicate with us regularly, we will fail you.

Evaluations

Set a realistic goal for all evaluation deadlines. If you fail to meet your own goal we are more likely to fail you in the evaluations.
Create at least one public commit that has been reviewed before each evaluation.
Have at least one commit merged into the current development branch of your project at the end of the summer to pass the final evaluation.
The last point is a hard requirement. Make sure that your time plan includes time for the review process.

Blog

Keep a regular journal of your experience as a student and blog at least once every 2 weeks.

Default Instructions

This is a general guide. Organizations can have different instructions and you must follow their instructions

Projects proposed by mentors are listed at our ideas list.

You are welcome to propose your own project. If you wish to do so, please contact the organization you want to work with before you start writing your proposal and explain your idea to them. If you choose to propose your own project idea you will need to find a mentor for the project. Proposals without a mentor will not be considered.

How to write a great Proposal

First, think about your choice of project carefully, you're going to be doing it for a couple of months, so it's important that you choose something you're going to enjoy. Once you've made your mind up:

Make sure you've thought about the project and understand what it entails.
Contact us early! The earlier you contact us the earlier you will be able to get feedback from us to improve your application.
Don't be afraid to come up with original solutions to the problem.
Don't be afraid to give us lots of detail about how you would approach the project.

Overall, your application should make us believe that you are capable of completing the project and delivering the functionality to our users. If you aren't sure about anything, get in touch with us, we're happy to advise you.

You can use our base template to get an idea about how to go about writing the proposal.

Dividing your project

We require that all of our students have at least one commit in the development branch of your project before the end of the summer. The best way to achieve this is to divide your project into small self contained subprojects and plan to merge at least one of them around the phase 2 evaluations. We also require you to have at least one commit reviewed by your mentor before each evaluation, the division of the project will help with this too. But don't worry too much, we are sure that you will create dozens if not hundreds of commits for your mentors review over the summer.

During your summer you'll likely encounter bugs in your project or find code that can be refactored to help you implement your ideas. You can also immediately fix them and help us all out. This has several advantages. All your pull requests will only concentrate on specific features and are much better to review. And you'll also get direct feedback from other developers and users during the summer.

Since this is a hard requirement we as mentors will also have an eye on that and check if your proposal incorporates it and also warn you ahead of time during the summer if we see that you might not make it. Communicating with us on a regular basis is vital for that, though.

How to estimate time needed for development

To get experience with a code base we recommend you try to fix some easy/beginner bug or refactor a piece of code that doesn't conform to the current style guides. Look at the code that you want to change, check if it follows our coding guidelines. Do some research on the APIs you want to use, plan what classes you will add and how their public API will look. Write down your algorithms in pseudo code. The better your research is and the better you plan ahead the easier it will be to judge how long a given task will take. For your time estimates you should also consider that you can do less stuff during exams and try to be a bit conservative. If you have never done anything like GSoC before you will tend to underestimate the time to complete a task. We know that giving these estimates is not easy and that also professionals have problems with it. Having a good plan and knowing its weak and strong points will help a lot.

Final Proposal

Your final proposal must be submitted to GSoC as a PDF file. Your proposal name should start with [sub-org-name] to make identification easier for the mentors.

Uh oh!