GSoC/Administer the GSoC

This page describes the different steps where admins need to intervine to administer a GSoC.

First communication on GSoC

We need to create the page in the wiki to submit the ideas: https://community.kde.org/GSoC/20xx/Ideas and link it in the main page while moving the previous year in the "See also" list.

We receive a mail from Google a few weeks before the event starts to describe if there are changes regarding the previous year. If there are we need to update the GSoC page and template for the next year. This mail needs to be forwarded to the KDE community list to kick off the GSoC (we need to be careful and remove any link that could be only for admins and mentors and forward these info only to the corresponding lists).

One week before the GSoC application submission deadline, we need to send a reminder to kde-devel/kde-community to add ideas to the list, the more ideas we have, the better chance we will have to be selected!

See https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2023q1/007499.html for an example of communication.

Submitting KDE application

We need to take care of submitting the KDE application on https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/kde-community/profile. Usually the page is already filled, we need to ensure there are no new fields to fill. Do not forget to update the year in the Ideas page! There are usually questions if we participated the previous years and how many contributors are still active (I think we don't store the info somewhere, I usually browse the invent profiles of the contributors to see if still active or not). Signing the agreement is part of the submission.

Once/If KDE is selected

We need to invite the new mentors to the application. For mentors that were already present the previous year, no need to invite them again, THEY need to log in and accept the rules for the current year.

See https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-community/2023q1/007524.html for an example of communication.

Ranking of the participants

This communication is done only on mentors mailing list. Once the contributors application deadline is passed, mentors need to tell which proposals they would like to mentor and rank them. This is done using the template on collaborate. For mentors to have access to it, they need to be added to the mentors group in invent.

When all participants are ranked, admins need to globally rank them and propose the list to the KDE mentors. If it is all agreed, admins need to fill the GSoC page with the results.

Accepted projects

Once Google officially announce the projects that have been selected admins have some communication to do:

• on kde-soc mailing list, explain what we expect: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-soc/2023-May/001640.html
• blog post to introduce the different participants, mentors and projects: https://mentorship.kde.org/blog/2024-05-gsoc-2024/, promote it with Promo team.
• once the bonding period is done, a reminder before starting the Coding period: https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-soc/2023-May/001657.html

Mid term

Reminder to mentors/contributors to submit the evaluation: See https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-soc/2023-July/001659.html for an example of communication (same should be sent the previous week to the mentors).

Potential changes during the project

If a project needs a deadline change, we also need to do it ourselves (there is a page in https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com telling which dates are authorised) after a request from the contributor and validation of the mentor.

End of GSoC

Once GSoC is finished, a blog post with all the successful projects should be published (example: https://mentorship.kde.org/blog/2024-11-15-gsoc-final-end/).

If some projects have different deadlines, we need to check if we do one blog post per each deadline or if we wait until the end.