GNU and Summer of Code

[Richard Stallman]

I send this to emacs-devel in the hope of finding some Emacs
developers who would like to mentor projects in the TODO list.


The GNU Project is participating in Google's Summer of Code program.
(See http://code.google.com/soc/mentorfaq.html for details.)  In
summary:

 * Summer of Code 2006 is a program that offers student developers
   stipends to work on development of free software.

 * The FSF will be paid $500 per project, too.

 * We need people to volunteer to mentor these students, and also
   people to evaluate other ideas that students may suggest.

 * Payment to the student is contingent upon feedback by the mentor.

 * There is no requirement that the finished code be included in the
   package itself, but goal is to get code we want to use.

 * For FSF-copyrighted GNU packages, we will ask the student to sign
   the usual copyright assignment before getting paid, to make sure
   there will be no legal obstacle to using his code.

If you are willing to mentor one or more projects, this could be of
great use to the GNU Project -- it would introduce new volunteers to
your package's code base, get a little funds for the FSF, and enhance
the GNU operating system.

Before you volunteer to be a mentor, please make sure you can actually
spare the time to do the work; having mentors become unresponsive or
drop out would be very bad.  It is important for projects to be
feasible for a good student-level hacker to do in 2 or 3 months;
nothing super large.

It is ok if you talk with student candidates that you already knoware
capable, to plan projects with them.  That is a good way to produce
projects that are really likely to get done, and done well.

To volunteer as a mentor, please send email to
<address@hidden>.  Please describe the student projects you
offer to mentor, and for each one, say which GNU package it will
enhance.

We need to find a "backup mentor" for each project; the backup mentor
is someone who will take over in case you become busy, sick, or
otherwise unavailable.  If you can think of any obvious suggestions
for backup mentors for your projects, please mention the suggestions
in your mail.  (We consider these suggestions are tentative, so you
can mention them first, then ask them if they are available.)  But if
you can't think of anyone, please suggest your project anyway.  We
will look for a suitable backup mentor.

James Youngman <address@hidden> will be taking care of accumulating the
offers and putting them in our web site, but he could use one or two
people to help.  If you are willing to help, please write to
<address@hidden>.