[Tdwg-phylo] Phyloinformatics Summer of Code 2011: Call for Mentors

Hilmar Lapp hlapp at nescent.org
Mon Feb 21 20:01:15 CET 2011


(Apologies if you receive multiple copies.)

Over the next 3 weeks we will be pulling together NESCent's  
application to the 2011 Google Summer of Code as a mentoring  
organization. This is a call for all prospective mentors, primary and  
secondary, to step forward.

Participating as an organization is competitive. Over the last years  
the acceptance rate for organizations has been around 30-35%. The most  
important component of organization applications is the Ideas page,  
and specifically the quality and suitability of the project ideas.  
These project ideas are contributed by you, our mentors. In the past  
we have had a strong, diverse and well-documented portfolio of ideas  
with different degrees of difficulty, from different participating  
open-source projects, using different programming languages.

If you can fancy yourself serving as a mentor, or helping someone else  
mentoring a student as a secondary mentor, or would like to help out  
in other capacities, please contact us as soon as you can at phylosoc-admin at nescent.org 
. If you have not been a mentor with us in previous years, we'll send  
you guidance on what doing so involves, and how you can contribute to  
our participation. We will also add everyone who is interested in  
serving to our (private) mentors mailing list (at least those who  
aren't already).

If you are new to Summer of Code and wonder what it takes or what it  
is like to be a mentor for us, don't hesitate to ask questions or to  
contact previous mentors (see URLs below for projects that got  
selected). Being a mentor does require time (see http://bit.ly/soc2011-mentortime) 
, but our past mentors have pretty much unanimously found it a fun and  
rewarding experience. That's aside from the code a student could  
contribute to your project, and, possibly most important of all in the  
long run, the chance to gain a new developer.

The initial skeleton of our 2011 Ideas page is now up here and ready  
for adding project ideas and mentors(*).

http://informatics.nescent.org/wiki/Phyloinformatics_Summer_of_Code_2011

We will send further guidance on drafting project ideas, but for now  
you can see examples of the format and scope of project ideas on the  
Ideas pages from previous years (click on "Ideas"):

http://informatics.nescent.org/wiki/Phyloinformatics_Summer_of_Code_2010
http://informatics.nescent.org/wiki/Phyloinformatics_Summer_of_Code_2009
http://informatics.nescent.org/wiki/Phyloinformatics_Summer_of_Code_2008
http://informatics.nescent.org/wiki/Phyloinformatics_Summer_of_Code_2007

Dates:
======

Submission of organization applications starts Feb 28 and closes on  
March 11. For project ideas to contribute to the strength of our  
application they must be in reasonable shape by the morning of March  
11. *If* we are accepted, ideas can be refined (or added) between  
March 18-27.

Students apply March 28-April 8, and selected students are announced  
April 25. The coding period runs from May 23 to August 22. See
http://bit.ly/soc2011-timeline for a full timeline of the whole program.

Cheers, and we look forward to hearing from you!

        Karen Cranston
        Hilmar Lapp

(*) Editing content on the NESCent Informatics wiki (f.k.a. Hackathon  
wiki) requires you to login. We had to disable local account creation  
due to spam getting out of control. The wiki is still open, though -  
just login with your OpenID. If you don't have an OpenID, the "Login  
with OpenID" page has information on you can easily get one, and if  
you have a Google account, you're all set to go.



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