Choosing a Mentoring Organization (long, but important)

[LH]

Hello everyone,

While I am *very* excited to see so many students excited about
getting involved with GSoC, there have been many many posts asking for
help choosing a mentoring organization and I am not sure that all this
traffic on the list is most useful to everyone.

In the spirit of keeping everyone's inbox clear and making sure that
all would-be Summer of Coders are well informed about investigating
potential mentoring organizations, here's some useful advice:

1) Check out the lists of past mentoring organizations and see if any
of them appeal to you:
http://code.google.com/soc/2007/
http://code.google.com/soc/2006/
http://code.google.com/soc/2005/

2) Check out the categorized list of mentoring organizations from
2007:
http://genmapp.org/gsoc/mentors_by_category.htm

Many thanks to Alex Pico for assembling that list last year.

3) If you are interested in a particular type of technology, try a few
simple web searches, e.g. python content management system or open
source web servers.

4) If you have questions about how the program works or are looking
for advice, please make sure you have read the FAQs and perused the
program wiki *first.* Google's program admins have put a lot of work
into creating this documentation for all of you, so please put it to
good use. If you still have a question after reading the
documentation thoroughly, then please do ping the list or ask in IRC
(#gsoc on Freenode).

http://code.google.com/soc/2008/faqs.html
http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/WikiStart

And one final note - finding the best possible mentoring organization
for you is something you must do yourself. No one can tell you which
community is the best for you; you need to take the time to
investigate the projects and make the best decision for you. Check
out a project's mailing list archives, idle in their IRC channel, read
their forums, etc. Ultimately, you can find the best place for your
efforts and your applications with just a little bit of legwork.

Cheers,
LH