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Note that this information is about a pilot program that happened back in 2013.

The ASF has been participating in many mentoring initiatives, and it’s now partnering in a pilot project with India ICFOSS to provide mentoring for undergraduate and graduate students that have interest in learning how to participate in open source communities at ASF.

The mentoring programme is not here to teach you to write documentation or code. It is here to help you understand how to make a valuable contribution to an Apache project. You can expect to be guided through our contribution processes. You can also expect to get technical support with respect to your chosen project. You cannot expect your mentor to be a “teacher”, they will provide enough information for you to progress within the project. You need to bring the confidence to take their guidance and discover the detail for yourself.

Proposed Schedule

Date Description
June 20 Local Workshop at ICFOSS headquarters in Kerala - India
June 24 - July 12 Would-be student participants discuss application ideas with ASF projects
July 15 Students project proposal submission opens
July 19 Students project proposal submission deadline
July 22 - August 02 Mentors review and rank students project proposals
August 05 Accepted student proposals announced
August 05 Students start coding their project proposal with Mentor guidance
September 09 Mentors and students can begin submitting mid-term evaluations
September 13 Mid-term evaluation deadline
October 21 Suggested ‘DCUT’ date, where students should then scrub code, enhance documentation, etc
October 28 Mentors and students can begin submitting final evaluations
November 1 Final evaluation deadline

Workshop Materials

The slides used for the local workshop at ICFOSS headquarters in Kerala are available for download.

Project Ideas

Project ideas are jira created by possible mentors and can be viewed at:

Applying for the Mentor Programme

Students can propose their own project ideas, or select one from the ASF provided list. After selecting the project ideas. students should create a project proposal following guidance from the mentor and the project community.

The project proposal should have, at minimum :

See the proposals examples below as guidance:

Note that the proposals below are just examples from previous GSoC programs, and each one have different strengths. But you should always follow your mentors advice, as he is the one that is going to be judging your proposals.