We're Moving

By Jeff Bailey, Open Source Team

Summer of Code is here and started! We have our new IRC channel, our website is up, and we're looking forward to signing up organizations.

But you might have noticed in the last year, we've been doing more. Quite a bit more! We've started talking more about the contributions that we've been making to Open Source. We ran the first ever Google Highly Open Participation&trade Contest. And we've started to make sure that we're telling about the various groups and people who've been helping us grow Open Source.

Summer of Code will always be special to us. It's one of the first ways that we reached out and connected, and we know that it's made a difference out there. From here on, though, we're going to talk about it on the new Google Open Source blog so you've got one place to look for all our posts. If you're looking to filter, we'll make sure that we always label the posts gsoc, so that you can get just the Summer of Code updates.

So, this isn't goodbye, but see you on the flip side....

Showcasing Summer of Coders Around the World

We've created a KML file (requires Google Earth) showcasing our successful 2007 student participants. The file will show you the global connections made between students and their mentors, and we have to say the results look pretty sweet.

Check it out and let us know what you think!

The Results Are In!

Summer of Code has wrapped up for 2007, and we're very pleased to announce that 81% of our student participants successfully completed their projects. This year, the program brought together over 900 students and nearly 1500 mentors in 90 countries to create code for over 130 open source projects, and we're particularly excited that our success rates have remained consistent as the program has expanded.

We'll be bringing you more news on the results of the program, as well as stories from our mentors and students in the coming weeks. We'll also be sharing some of the results of the final program evaluations with you.

Congratulations to all of our mentors and students for another amazing Summer of Code! If you have a story you'd like to share with the community now, please post a comment and let us all know.

Thanks to Our Mentors

Final evaluations for Summer of Code are in full swing, and as the program winds down for the year we've been having some great discussions on the mentor's mailing list about lessons learned during the program. The majority of these conversations have been overwhelmingly positive, and we're looking forward to rolling the feedback from the mailing list and the program evaluations into useful how-to documentation for mentors.

That said, one of our mentors quite rightly pointed out that mentoring is hard work. Mentoring requires a wide variety of skills, most of them having nothing to do with the quality of code a mentor writes: good communication habits, providing encouragement, giving constructive criticism in an effective and useful manner, and proactively determining which points that seem glaringly obvious to folks involved with the project are non-intuitive for newcomers. Mentoring certainly requires a dialogue and level of social interaction that's not necessarily the standard 'procedure' for a particular open source project.

So, a great big thank you to all of our mentors. Your job is a difficult one, and we truly appreciate all your efforts to make your students and Summer of Code successful.

(Oh yeah, and don't forget to turn in your final evaluations.)

Midterm Results Are In!

We finished collecting all Summer of Code midterm evaluations yesterday, and the results are promising. 90% of our students received successful midterm evaluations from their mentors, which is a slight decrease compared with 95% last year. When taking a look at why our numbers had dropped this year, our conclusion is that the lengthened program timeline allowed mentors and students more up front time to interact and work on project planning; in cases where there was not a good match between a student's schedule or skill set, the discrepancy became apparent much more quickly than in previous years.

While we learned a great deal from the feedback we received from the community as part of the evaluation process, three key themes emerged:

Communicate Early, Communicate Often

Nearly all students who received rave reviews from their mentors were in contact with their mentor multiple times per week, often communicating via voice as well as email and chat/IRC. Mentors who required status update reports from their students also felt they were better able to monitor student progress and provide guidance where needed, and many mentors reported that their best students sent regular status updates unprompted.

Life Happens

A few mentors lamented that they'd prefer to spend more time with their students, most often stating that it was their busy schedules which precluded a closer working relationship. Many students found that they had underestimated the amount of time it would take to complete key project milestones given other commitments. Most participants who reported that they'd like to more effectively manage their SoC tasks had a solid plan in place for devoting more time to SoC in the final month.

More Time is Better

The lengthened timeline was quite well received by the community. Many mentors reported that they used the community bonding period to better acquaint their students with the inner workings of the project, as well as to help them get up to speed with the project's tools and documentation. Several students used the community bonding to do more in depth research on their project topics, some finding that particular academic papers helped them optimize their project plan and resulting code before even getting started. Perhaps the coolest result of the community bonding period, many returning SoCers reported that the extra time gave them the opportunity to help newer students learn more quickly. We're looking forward to seeing if including the community bonding period encourages more students to stay on as long-term contributors to their projects.

If you'd like to learn more about the program evaluations, you can check out the mentor evaluation questions and the student evaluation questions. If you're curious about responses to a particular question, post a comment and let us know!

So what is this community bonding all about?

One of the biggest changes to the program this year is the inclusion of nearly two extra months in the program timeline. We got some great feedback from our students and mentors last year that three months is often too little time to read necessary documentation, write code and participate in the organization's community in-depth. Since our not so secret desire is for our students to stick around and keep contributing to their organization's code base long after the program ends, we figured we'd give you some extra time to get up to speed on the community side.

In practice, the community bonding period is all about, well, community bonding. Rather than jumping straight into coding, you've got some time to learn about your organization's processes - release and otherwise - developer interactions, codes of conduct, etc. We also figured it would be easier to socially engage with your fellow developers when the pressure to ship isn't looming in your vision. I know few folks who didn't lurk in a project's IRC channel for weeks or even months before submitting their first patch, let alone saying hello and getting to know the other folks in the channel.

If you've already worked with with your organization's code base and developers, great! Take this time to help out your fellow students who haven't. There's a great deal of undocumented lore in every community, and your previous experience can be invaluable to them as they get started.

And why aren't you mentoring already? ;)

What Happens Now?

The acceptance stir has stilled and #summer-discuss on Slashnet is largely quiet. If you're an accepted student or brand new mentor, you're probably wondering "What happens now?"

This year, we've built nearly two extra months into the program time line to give students time to integrate with their communities and get up to speed before starting their coding projects. Now is the perfect time to introduce your students to your project in depth. Here are some tips with you to help you get started.

Mentors and organization administrators, take this time to reach out to your accepted students: welcome them to the project and make sure they know who their mentor and, if applicable, back up mentor will be. Let them know where they can take questions if they can't reach their mentor. Encourage them to talk amongst themselves to build camaraderie and mutual inspiration.

Students, if you haven't already, sign up for your project's development mailing lists and hang out in your organization's forums or IRC channel. Start learning more about the way social interactions occur between its developers. If you take the time to learn now how the members of your organization communicate, you'll be able to tell the difference between idle banter and developers concentrating on solving a serious problem. Certainly helps you to not step in with a question at an inopportune time.

In addition, now is a great time to get started on all the administrivia needed to begin contributing to the project. Do you need to get a CVS account? Rethink your project plan? Get access to other project resources so you can get started? Your mentor will be able to help you with these things.

New mentors, if you're not sure of all the points to cover with your students, I'd check out Robert Douglass' post. It contains most of the salient points sent in Drupal's introductory email to their 2007 students. If you haven't already taken the time to send your students a message with this type of information, this weekend is a fine time to do it.

On the Google side, we're working on getting the mailing lists and blog planet together. We're looking forward to spending another year with some of you and starting a new one with many of you. Google Summer of Code 2007 is on!