(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@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.