Submitting ideas to the mentoring programme

We invite all ASF projects to submit their ideas for consideration in the ASF mentoring programme. Any Apache member and experienced committers can submit ideas via Jira (if your project does not use Jira you can use the Comdev GSoC Issue Tracker For GSoC Tasks. We are looking for as many interesting projects as we can come up with.

Important Steps

Size of project

Starting in 2024 there are 3 types of projects available.
Please put "full-time" label for ~350 hours project and
"part-time" label for ~175 hours project
"small" label for ~90 hours project

Please NOTE Ideas list is manually updated by GSoC admins, please ping mentors (at) community.apache.org if the page is not being updated .. :))

Details

To ensure we include your Jira issues in our list of mentored projects, please add the label “mentor” to the issue. If you want it to be included in the Google Summer of Code lists also add the “gsoc” label. If you want to include a number of issues in a single mentored project, please create a parent issue, label that one appropriately and add the other issues as sub-tasks. Do not label each individual sub-task as that would make them appear as separate tasks.

If you have identifed a mentor, assign the issue to that mentor.

ASF Members and committers can volunteer to mentor or co-mentor proposals. When in doubt about all this, contact mentors@community.apache.org.

For more information about what it means to be a mentor and on how to write a proposal, see:

Note that interest, even by a qualified student, does not mean that any of those project will automatically go ahead. Depending on the number of projects; the number of people able to mentor, and the timing we will probably have to make a smaller selection.

Publicising your mentored issues

You can link to the ASF wide list of issues or you can create your own lists and feeds within your own website.

Since your mentored issues appear alongside your normal Jira issues, you can create and use filters to help people find them. You can provide RSS feeds, JSON exports and many more goodies for helping to get the message out.

If you have any cool ideas for using this data, let us know so we can share them with other projects (mail dev@community.apache.org).

Examples

Staying in touch

All mentors/prospective mentors must subscribe to mentors@community.apache.org, our list for coordinating mentor activities. This is where mentor specific issues are dealt with, and where announcements will be made.

We only accept subscriptions to mentors@ from addresses known to belong to ASF committers, so please use your @apache.org address to subscribe if possible, or at least an address that we can match to your @apache.org address via the ASF’s private/committers/info or private/committers/MailAlias.txt data.

Once the ASF is confirmed as a mentoring organisation mentors must register with the GSoC webapp, and request to become a mentor for the ASF organization. Make sure that the email address you use for that (it’s often your @gmail.com address by default) is ‘‘‘registered as a mail alias for your Apache account at (https://id.apache.org)’’’ so that we can match it to your ASF account.

If you are interested in mentor programme administration please also subscribe to dev@community.apache.org.

If you are planning on mentoring as part of the GSoC programme you also need to register with Google. See our GSoC page for more information.

How much effort is involved with being a mentor?

Most mentors spend between three and five hours per week with their students. Most of this time is spent encouraging them.

Within the ASF we like to think that the whole project community will help the student, just as they would any other community member. If your project is supportive in this way, you may be able to get away with spending less time yourself. However, as mentor you are responsible for evaluating the student and helping them deliver on their commitments.

The GSoC Mentoring Guide has plenty of useful materials for mentors.

A note about eligibility

If your project has any restrictions on who can participate (as is the case with Harmony, for example) be sure to clarify these with potential students as early as possible. It causes unnecessary confusion and disappointment if a student is awarded a slot but is later found to be ineligible. Don’t rely on the fact that the student should have read details on the project web site. You must discuss their eligibility before offering to mentor them. Also make a note in the webapp stating that you have, as far as possible, confirmed the student is eligible to contribute.