The Google Summer of Code 2012 is coming up.

The last two years I participate the GSoC as a mentor and last year I had the great opportunity to join the mentor summit in SF. I really got into the idea of GSoC. You might have read my article about what can be improved this year. Maybe thats why I have been asked recently to join the this years TYPO3-GSoC-Admin-Team to organize TYPO3′s Summer of Code.

One of the main issues of the last year was the lack of inner and outer communication. Ingo and I already started to discuss how to improve that. However, beside of the regular “official reports” on news.typo3.org, I’m going to blog about my personal point of view during the summer. At least I’m trying to do so.

We need you!

On last monday the organization application phase did start. The deadline is the next friday the 9.3. Which means we have like one week from now.

Now it’s our turn to apply and to do so and to get the best out of this summer, we urgently need your help!

For the moment we need a) possible Mentors and b) ideas for projects.

Could you imagine beeing a mentor?

The mentor is like the project manager for a student and his project. You going to decide, together with the other mentors, which students proposals will be accepted and you will guide one of these projects over the summer. You should already be involved in the TYPO3-Community and really feel the spirit of TYPO3. You are not going to actualy ‘work’ or even code on your students project. That’s really the students part. The mentors task is more about involving the student into our community, getting and keeping the student on track and beeing available for your students questions. Expect like 3-5 hours of work per week. You will need to do hand in a midterm and a final evaluation to google, which actualy is a short questionaire. You going to do regular status meetings with your student (e.g. by skype), reviewing the students work, joining our regular mentor meetings in BigBlueButton e.g. to report about the project status. Never done something like this before? No problem: You won’t be alone. We will have some experienced mentors from the last years again, which gladly will help to solve all questions. This is one of the reasons why we will do regular mentor meetings this year. What you will get? First of all a great summer with a cool project and a cool student. Also there is a small(!) compensation. Two of our mentors will join the mentor summit in San Francisco at the Google HQ. But most important: you will do something good for the student, for the OpenSource spirit and for TYPO3! And hey: There will be T-Shirts for everyone!

As I was a mentor for two years now, I can tell you it’s a really nice and fun job and worthful experience.

Any questions about beeing a mentor? Like to be one? Get in touch with me!

Ideas for possible projects

When the students apply in the next phase of GSoC, they will hand in project proposals. As most of the students are not that deep into TYPO3 and about our current projects, we need to provide some possible ideas. In the last years we had an ‘ideas’ page (actualy Google requires us to have one), which we need to update for this years application.

We need any project idea related to the TYPO3 core, FLOW3 or ‘Phoenix’. Any rough idea will do! No need for fully concepted/drafted projects, just ideas. I’m going to collect all of these ideas and discuss them with the mentors. These ideas, which we think are doable by a student during the summer, will be presented on the ideas page.

For example: completely rewriting the v4 list module might not be doable for someone never have seen TYPO3 before. A FLOW3 package to browse model data is.

If you are a core team member, core project team member (/leader), a experienced TYPO3 developer or just someone actualy heavily using TYPO3 or FLOW3 and have an idea? Drop me a line!

Make it our “summer of code”

I’m really looking forward to this summer.

Do not hesitate to contact me if you like to participate or if you have any questions or ideas:

• tobias.liebig(at)typo3.org
• Twitter: @etobi or @typo3_gsoc
• Jabber: etobi@jabber.ccc.de
• Skype: tobias7031
• or just leave a comment here

The Google Summer of Code 2012 is coming up. The last two years I participate the GSoC as a mentor and last year I had the great opportunity to join...