Letter to Google Summer of Code 2012 students and the SilverStripe community

[Sigurd Magnusson]

Dear potential applicants,

We've decided to make this mailing list the primary location for students to introduce themselves and discuss and propose their GSOC project ideas. This is enables all the mentors and community to help you form great ideas, and allows us to spread the workload over multiple people, and follows a standard practice for other open source projects involved in GSOC. Later, when we need to judge project proposals, we can also use your public discussions as one factor in deciding who is accepted.

There are three exceptions:

1. You still need to make your final application by April 6 on the official GSOC system at http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/google/gsoc2012/silverstripe . Submissions there will be private and read only by mentors, however we'd hope that we would already know you from your discussions on this list. It's less likely we'll accept a submission that hasn't been discussed on this list (and thus improved and refined by community input).

2. This list concerns itself mostly with contributing to, and improving, our software. If you have general questions like how to install SilverStripe CMS or what the location is for certain documentation, this isn't the best place. Have a look first over at www.silverstripe.org/forum and ask on IRC channel ( http://www.silverstripe.org/irc-channel/ ) and ask here only if you can't get what you need. When projects are agreed and accepted students are working on code, students and mentors will need to discuss their work regularly, so we'll come up with further GSOC guidelines so that this list remains focussed.

3. If you do need to discuss something privately, email me, but my general view will be to ask you to repeat your question in an open forum.

Some background and thoughts are below.

(I'd like attribute the ideas below to Andrew Su from Crowdsourcing Biology and thank him for sharing his own thoughts with me - https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en&fromgroups#!topic/crowdbio/pUr3cI3ouSM ) 

We understand that some of you may have hesitations about developing your project ideas here on this public mailing list, particularly since a good project idea is at the core of a good application.  It's an issue that we've certainly thought about, and we certainly don't want to drive people away who are coming up with innovative ideas.  We have a few thoughts on this:

  - First, we mentors are watching very closely where ideas are coming from, and the mailing list is a perfect way to have a definitive record of that.  So, don't blatantly steal others' ideas, and don't be worried that your ideas will be stolen.

  - Second, it is our hope that you can also read the discussions from other applicants to better learn what we're looking for, and vice versa.  This exchange will make everyone's applications even better, and we think this "idea building" process is in the open source spirit. (You are also welcome to look at other open source projects' public project ideas too, as a result.)

  - Third, once we get to the stage of establishing your specific qualifications through code samples and/or a resume, private email can be used.

 - Four, we feel GSOC is an opportunity to encourage and promote open source and its ways of thinking. It makes sense to us to encourage you to join our community from day one and work us in an open, transparent, and supportive manner.

We look forward to our involvement in GSOC being a success and for this to happen, we will be open and flexible to hear ideas and concerns. If you have any, please post to me on (of if you really must, off) this list.

Cheers,

Sigurd