Google Summer of Code 2019 Mentor Summit

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Google Summer of Code 2019 Mentor Summit

Each year Google hosts the "Mentor Summit", where up to 3 OSGeo delegates can attend (2 GSoC + 1 GCI delegates). This year it will exceptionally held in Munich. The date for this year's summit is: Thursday, October 17 - Sunday, October 20 2019.

Selection Process

For 2019 we'll use the same rules as decided last year:

• Of the 3 OSGeo delegates, an admin, a GSoC mentor and a GCI mentor, unless no admins or no mentors apply to go, in which case, it'll be 2 admins or 2 mentors for GSoC. The GCI mentor's invitation has been sent separately, so if no GCI mentor candidates to go, nobody can replace him / her.

GSoC Mentor Candidates

• Eligibility:
  • must comply with Google requirements (must be 2019 Mentors with assigned student projects or a 2019 Organization Administrator);
  • for mentors : must be mentor of an OSGeo project (at least as an OSGeo community project or as a project entered into OSGeo incubation, if not an official OSGeo project), as you would be a delegate of the OSGeo foundation.
• The call is open to hear who is interested to go. Whoever responds must COMMIT to go, otherwise you will take away the opportunity from someone else. Please enter your names in this page.
• Selection: we agreed that we must make a (fully transparent, open) lottery (Thanks Victoria). We will use a randomizer tool (below) to decide if need be. Time is short and people need to make paperwork for VISA. Please sign your name below if you are interested to attend.
• Other requirements: the selected delegates are requested to make a report after returning home from the summit.

Signing below, you commit to go to the summit in the event of a positive outcome in the lottery

GSoC Admins

• Helmut Kudrnovsky

Mentors

• Rajat Shinde

Draw Time

2019-09-12 @ 15:00 UTC https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=GSoC+summit+2019+lottery+draw&iso=20190812T15&p1=1440

Report

The selected OSGeo delegates are required to make a report after returning home from the summit.

Lottery Results

• Rajat Shinde

GCI Mentor Candidates

Google has recently notified the OSGeo admins that Google would like to invite 1 of the OSGeo mentors from GCI 2018 to come to the GSoC 2019 Mentor Summit. Google will add $1100 to the stipend that is sent in early September, if OSGeo decides to send a GCI mentor to the GSoC 2019 summit.

OSGeo GCI admins have agreed to open the opportunity to attend to the recent OSGeo GCI mentors, using a lottery to decide if need be. Here are the requirements:

Eligibility:

• must comply with Google requirements (must have been a 2018 GCI Mentor for OSGeo);
• must have been a mentor who participated in at least one OSGeo project task instance, working with a student (meaning that you interacted with a student on at least one instance, through the GCI Dashboard)

Signup Below

Signing below, you commit to go to the summit in the event of a positive outcome in the lottery

• Cameron Green
• Celia Virginia Vergara Castillo (Vicky Vergara)
• Abhinav Kumar
• Rahul Chauhan

Draw Time

2019-09-12 @ 15:00 UTC https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=GSoC+summit+2019+lottery+draw&iso=20190812T15&p1=1440

Draw Results

• public record of random draw: https://app.randompicker.com/protocol/625863x31759 (scroll down)
• winner: Celia Virginia Vergara Castillo

Report

The selected OSGeo delegates are required to make a report after returning home from the summit. GCI delegate is requested to send it to the "gci-discuss" OSGeo mailing list. All, please write your report here.

OSGeo Delegates 2019

• Helmut Kudrnovsky
• Celia Virginia Vergara Castillo
• Rajat Shinde

Reports

Google Summer of Code 2019 Mentor Summit October 17-20 in Munich

GSoC summit 2019 in Munich (photo by Sebastian Koslowski)

GSoC project presentation

More than 300 mentors from 162 organizations and 42 countries have registered for the Mentor Summit in Munich to celebrate 15 years of GSoC. The Mentors Summit is an unconference that brings together organization administrators and mentors for an opportunity to share experience and network with other GSoC participants.

The overview of sessions and related notes give a nice impression of the diverse discussions about the GSoC program. Some important issues: Each year universities have different examination time schedules, managing students' availabilty is sometimes hard. Is the community bonding period too long? This time the period was reduced to 3 weeks, while students still say its still too long, some students do the exams during the community bonding period. GSoC can’t be run the whole year (or can’t be run twice a year) because mentors don’t have that much bandwidth to look into so many proposals twice a year. Should the GSoC program be opened to non-students? But how we can find volumteering mentors then?

No final decisions have be done so far by Google for design and possible changes of the next GSoC editions.

Celia Virginia Vergara Castillo presented some of the OSGeo's GSoC projects in a video during the lightning talk sessions. For the next summit, such a video may be prepared for all OSGeo's GSoC projects.

GSoC meet up

At this mentor summit, because the Google offices are "small", there was no visit to the Google offices. But, we are fortunate that one of our GSoC students (2017-2018) is now working for Google. Although our plan was not to go to the offices, when he arrived to the summit I was with some mentor/students (from other organizations), and they were so interested on how he accomplish "the impossible". It is amazing to see how the young eyes lit and how their expectations in life are changing for more than what they were aiming for. That change of perspective on those that are "beginning" in life, what can I say, it makes us as mentors to go on doing what we are doing.

An interesting conference was: "How to get more women* interested in FOSS"; as first points trying to detect the point of origin that is a stopper for non male genders to participate, not only in FOSS, stoppers like: family, society, cultures, laws etc. and how we can deal with the problem. I took my Mexican (girl) doll to the summit and during the lightning talks I left her on the stage when I made the OSGeo presentation: "a woman on all lightning talks". That didn't stop there: on the second session, the Google organizer of the lightning talks asked me to place the doll on stage again.

Org admins of GSoC python activities have reported about tools to organize automagically GSoC over the coding period (e.g. weekly report reminders, etc). A closer look at such tools should be done for the next OSgeo's GSoC activities.