[SoC] OSGeo's GSoC 2018 - what's next: community bonding period

[Helmut Kudrnovsky]

Dear students,

as part of your acceptance into GSoC, you are expected to actively participate in the Community Bonding period (April 23 - May 13).

The *Community Bonding period* is no relax time! 

It is intended to help you getting ready to start contributing to your organization at full speed starting from May 14.

What are you going to do during the Community Bonding period?

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* Request writing access to the OSGeo wiki, you need it to edit all info related to your project
* Get to know your mentors, establish with them a way of communication, that can be video call, chat, email, etc.
* Familiarize with the community practices and processes: how does the community communicate? Where is the source code published? How does the bug tracker work? 
* Introduce yourself and your project in SOC mailing list as well as the mailing list used by your software community, and start a public dialogue to gather feedback and refine your project accordingly.
* Redefine your project with more detailed weekly milestones, with the help of your mentors and the feedback of the community, embedding the 3 evaluation periods in your timetable, adding more details, figuring out potential issues, etc.
* Become familiar with the developer manuals
* Study relevant material for your project
* Install the developer environment and get ready to start coding
* Participate in Mailing Lists / IRC / etc, try and help users
* Start coding for bug fixes not necessarily related to your project: it is a good exercise to become familiar with the code base
* Set up your repository, wiki page for your project, blog if you wish, etc. Don’t forget to include these info in the report due at the end of the bonding period.
* Ask your mentors for guidance on how to commit to the project repository. Bear in mind that you should commit often, not just at evaluation periods. However, depending on the policy given by your mentors, you might be requested to commit in your own repository and make a PR only when the code is mature to be included in the main repo. Discuss the details with your mentors.
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At the end of the bonding period you are expected to produce a detailed report of all the above activities that you carried out. Make sure you get in touch with your mentors and the community at large during the bonding period. It will save you time later on.


To recap, we request you to do the following now:

* Write an introductory email to our SOC mailing list and to your community dev mailing list, detailing your project and asking for feedback. Also include information about your wiki page, public repository and any other way the community can follow updates for your project, like a blog, a Twitter account, etc...

* Add the links to your wiki page and public repository in the accepted students wiki page [2] - you need to request writing access first

* Now it's a good time to study again Google's GSoC students guide [3] and OSGeo's specific instructions [4] [5], they contain useful advices from past years.

* Public interaction is important -- it is a key principle of open source -- work happens where everyone can see it.

Have a fun and we wish you a productive summer!

kind regards,
OSGeo GSoC Adminis
    
[1] http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/soc
[2] https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2018_Accepted
[3] https://flossmanuals.net/GSoCStudentGuide/
[4] https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_Recommendations_for_Students#What_to_expect_after_application
[5] http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_Recommendations_for_Students#What_to_expect_during_the_summer