[QGIS-Developer] Post-mortem of application to Google Summer of Code

[Greg Troxel]

Emma Hain via QGIS-Developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org> writes:

> Mentors to be put forward - I see this information
> <https://google.github.io/gsocguides/mentor/>:
> *Mentors are people from the community who volunteer to work with a GSoC
> contributor. Mentors provide guidance such as pointers to useful
> documentation, code reviews, etc. In addition to providing GSoC
> contributors with feedback and pointers, a mentor acts as an ambassador to
> help GSoC contributors integrate into their project’s community. Some
> organizations choose to assign more than one mentor to each of their GSoC
> contributors. Many members of the community provide guidance to their
> project’s GSoC contributors without mentoring in an “official” capacity,
> much as they would answer anyone’s questions on the project’s mailing list
> or chat channel. *

(I'm here as a packager and not currently deeply enough involved in qgis
to function as a mentor, but my opinion is based on other communities
where I feel qualified to be a mentor.)

A contrarian view: I view GSoC as a google recruiting activity; it's
like having interns, except you care even less if they do anything
useful or cause trouble.  For those who haven't been a manager at a
company and dealt with labor law: interns are awesome because after 10
weeks or whatever they terminate on schedule.  That means if they are
unsuitable you can just take them to lunch and say it's been great and
not rehire them, and this is vastly less costly and painful than firing
someone.  If they are suitable you can invite them back for next summer
or for a permanent position, and you've taken a bunch of risk off the
table.  I'm not saying I know that this is google's plan; it's just
obviously what a company would do.  It's entirely reasonable of them to
do this.

However: I don't want to be staff for a company's recruiting activity,
basically at all, but if so only at a proper consulting rate with
acceptable terms -- which is obviously out of the question.  So I simply
step back and ignore GSoC.

I do try to be helpful to people, regardless, as long as they have met
their half of the social contract around asking for help.  I have found
GSoC and non-GSoC people to be on both sides of that, and am not
claiming there is a correlation.  I do see people showing up in another
project's list saying "I'm interesting in this project [listed as GSoC
fodder but needing doing anyway, that they obviously know nothing about
and know almost nothing about the project] - can you tell me how to
proceed?".  I think many people ignore them, and some tell them to first
install the project, learn how it works and start reading the code.
That's usually the end of that!  Others come from a place of more clue
and more importantly more effort, and that goes much better.

> I also see there is a fair amount time required by the mentor and that a
> stipend is provided to the project at the end of the GSoC. Would this
> stipend be then passed onto the Mentor to assist with the time applied?

That's an interesting question.  I would guess the project is set up to
provide payments and deal with the required tax reporting in the first
place.  There is also the question what's in the GSoC org agreement and
if that's ok.  I would not assume it is ok; it seems structured to hand
money to projects not mentors, perhaps as part of claiming the entire
program expense as charity.  Speculation of course -- the point is that
these are surely agreements written by their lawyers, and it's best not
to make assumptions.

> Contributors - I see this is for individuals - is this something we can
> broadcast on our channels and within our user groups?

Mildly, I see asking more than a small number of times as crossing over
into advertising for google's recruiting activity and thus into spammy.

I don't know if I'm an extreme outlier or part of the silent 50% in my
opinions.  I am pretty sure I'm an outlier in being willing to outright
say them!

I'm writing this partly because when project leaders ask "why aren't
more people volunteering to be mentors" it may not have occured to them
that some (fraction unclear) just outright wouldn't because of the
structural issue, before you get to the other considerations.

Greg