[godot-devel] Mentors and ideas list for the GSoC 2018

[Rémi Verschelde <rverschelde@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi everyone,

TL;DR: We need volunteers to co-mentor GSoC students, and help to
flesh out the ideas list [0] that potential interns will use as a
basis for their applications.

-----

At last some activity on this devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx mailing list :)

I also put in copy some core contributors who are not registered to
the mailing list yet (you should, it's very low traffic but quite
useful when we want to communicate with all devs with abusing GitHub
issues). Here's how to register [1].


You likely saw that Godot got selected for the Google Summer of Code
2018 [2], which means that we'll have several students working for 3
months on specific topics from May 14, 2018 to August 6, 2018. See [2]
for the detailed timeline.

We need your help for two things:


## Updating the ideas list

Juan, George and I spend some time in a hurry (right before the GSoC
application deadline) to put up a list of ideas of possible topics
students could work on [0]. We did well as many other applications to
GSoC had no ideas list or less detailed ones and got rejected.

This list is checked by students who might be interested in
candidating for GSoC with Godot, though they are of course free to
come up with their own ideas... But usually it's easier if we can give
them some pointers.

It's quite difficult to estimate what will be the tasks at hand that a
student could work on for 3 months starting May 2018 (you guys
contribute so much and so fast that we hardly have visibility so many
months away), and some of the ideas list are already partly obsolete
(Bastiaan already got working Oculus support last week...).

At any rate, we can put as many ideas as we want there, so we need
your suggestions to flesh it out. You can just fork the repo and make
a pull request with your additional ideas, or open an issue to discuss
them, or even discuss them here first.

It's very important that we have decent stuff to propose, so please
help :) See link [0].


## Potential (co-)mentors

Once we select students, we'll need people to mentor them during their
internship, to ensure that they properly define their objectives and
work regularly and efficiently towards resolving them.

Since we're new to GSoC and don't want to overburden anyone, we
decided to give 2 mentors to each student, so that the mentors can
relay themselves if one is not available. Mentoring would happen
mainly via email, and also on IRC if possible (or any other means of
communication mentors would agree upon with their students).

So here we need you again: please tell me ASAP if you'd be OK to be a
co-mentor for a student. Of course this would be on a topic for which
you are relevant, and saying "yes" today is non-binding: until we
actually select the students, you can still change your mind. And
you'll also have a say in what students we accept, etc., to ensure
that you feel confident about their project.

I don't have experience as a GSoC mentor either, so I can't really
tell what the workload would be. But it should not be more than 1 hour
per day per mentor, ideally less if we have students who don't need
hand holding. We'll also encourage students to ask their general
questions in #godotengine-devel directly to share the mentoring
workload with other contributors.

Google will send potential mentors more details about what this task
entails, and we still have some time to review the docs [3] and decide
on our workflow.

So again, this is non-binding for now, but if you'd be OK to help
mentor a student, please tell me ASAP so that I can add you to the
GSoC page for Godot as potential mentor.

If there are some points of the ideas list [0] for which you think you
could mentor a student, please also tell me (again, that's
non-binding, it's just to have an idea of who could do what, and maybe
where to redirect student questions about a specific topic before the
applications deadline). You also don't need to be an engine-guru to be
a good mentor, so don't shy away before the task :)


Also, if you are a student yourself, I guess nothing prevents you from
applying to GSoC too, even if you are already a core contributor :)


Thanks in advance for your help :)

Rémi


[0] https://github.com/godotengine/roadmap/blob/master/GSOC-2018.md
[1] https://listengine.tuxfamily.org/godotengine.org/devel/
[2] https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/
[3] https://google.github.io/gsocguides/mentor/