[OSGeo Africa] FW: [OSGeo-Discuss] Google Summer of Code 2008

[Gavin Fleming]

Hi all

Apologies for any cross posting. While the Google Summer of Code (SoC)
is very northern-hemisphere-centric it is a great opportunity for
students to spend some solid time developing, in our case, FOSS GIS
software. 

For the Africa / GISSA list - all student developers out there see what
opportunities there are - the OSGeo projects will be proposing problems
that need solutions and if you get through the hurdles you could get
three months of paid mentorship in attempting to develop those
solutions. Some very novel ideas have emerged from the SoC in the past,
as have some bright programmers. 

For the FOSS4G2008 LOC - we'd like to encourage students from the region
to participate as well enticing FOSS GIS-related SoC 'graduates' to
attend FOSS4G2008.


Gavin 

-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org
[mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.osgeo.org] On Behalf Of Wolf Bergenheim
Sent: 20 February 2008 03:54 PM
To: OSGeo Discussions; OSGeo SoC
Subject: [OSGeo-Discuss] Google Summer of Code 2008

Hello fellow OSGeoers!

Google is about to announce summer of code 2008, and this year I'd like 
to be a bit more prepared.

So for this reason I have updated our old SoC Wiki page [1] with 
information for this year.

Each project should now start to think of ideas and also who their 
mentors should be.

We should also decide on a uniform way to review the student 
applications. Do we need/want to have an entry exam? A few questions 
about gis and some simple generic programming task? Do you have other
ideas?

As for the ideas themselves it seems that the trend is to have not very 
detailed but not too generic ideas either. These semi-generic ideas 
should get the creative juices of the students to flow, which should 
help us in finding the best and the brightest. I think this is good 
advice, it will allow us to judge the applications also on the base of 
what the students come up with.

Also we should create a wiki page for each application we find even a 
bit interesting to flesh it out during the review period.

In the Google SoC wiki page [2] they have some very good advice. If you 
want to be a mentor, be sure to read them, then talk among your selves 
and decide on who the mentor(s) should be. Google recommends 2 mentors 
per student (plus 1 generic backup mentor), but that depends a bit on 
the mentors (and students), and if you are going to have a summer
vacation.

So project mentors or people interested in SoC, please read [1] and [2] 
and maybe start working on the idea page of your project.

[1] http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Google_Summer_of_Code
[2] http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/AdviceforMentors

Looking forward to another Summer of Code,
--Wolf

-- 

<:3 )---- Wolf Bergenheim ----( 8:>

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