Hi Serge Stinckwich,

Thank you for registering to be a GSoC 2017 mentor or organization administrator!

We have many new mentors and organizations this year so we wanted to go through some important details to help you understand the process for the next couple of months.

Please take the time to reach out to your organization administrator about what is expected of you this year as a mentor. We also encourage you to read the entire Google Summer of Code mentor manual and the Roles and Responsibilities doc if you haven't done so already. Both the manual and Roles and Responsibilities doc were written by GSoC veteran Org Admins, Mentors, former students and Google Program Admins. They have helpful information about the program and how to participate successfully at each step in GSoC.

New GSoC Orgs: the section about participating in your first GSoC has some great tips.

To see all emails sent to mentors and org admins visit this page that will continue to be updated throughout the program.

Student Proposals

As of today, students are able to submit their proposals via the website. Each student may submit up to 5 proposals to the program. They can submit multiple proposals to the same organization for different projects if they wish.

Historically, the students with the best proposals reach out to the orgs early to receive feedback before submitting their final proposal. To encourage more students to seek feedback on their proposals we made draft proposals part of the official proposal workflow. Be sure to refresh your dashboard periodically so that you can see when new drafts are ready to review. You will not receive an email. We are encouraging the use of Google Docs for proposals as this will allow you to comment directly on the proposal (if the student sets their sharing settings correctly).

Over the next couple of weeks you will be interacting with dozens and in some cases hundreds of students interested in working with your project. We know many of you may become overwhelmed and some students can be impatient, so you may want to have an auto-responder or some sort of canned response to let students know you are looking at their proposals but it could take X days to receive a response.

Students must submit their final proposal as a PDF through the website. It will be visible to you after the deadline for student applications (April 3 16:00 UTC). You should make your decisions on which students to accept based on the contents of the final PDF proposal and your interactions with the student.

Students can delete their proposals and you will not receive an email of the deletion. If a proposal disappears from your list, it is likely because they deleted it.

Working with Students

All student projects must have at least 1 mentor assigned to the project. We strongly encourage assigning a second mentor as a backup mentor or co-mentor. A mentor should not be the primary mentor for more than one or two students. Mentoring can be a lot of work and we don’t want anyone to burn out and become frustrated with the program.

Important GSoC 2017 Dates and Deadlines

March 20 - April 3 16:00 UTC: Mentors and Org Admins review student draft proposals and give students feedback on their proposals.
April 3 - 16: Review all submitted student proposals with your org and consider how many you want to select and how many you can handle. Decide on the minimum/maximum number of student slots to request.
April 17, 16:00 UTC: Deadline to submit slot requests (OAs enter requests)
April 19, 16:00 UTC: Slot allocations are announced by Google
April 19 - 24 16:00 UTC : Select the proposals to become student projects. At least 1 mentor must be assigned to each project before it can be selected. (OAs enter selections)
April 24 - May 4: Google Program Admins will do another review of student eligibility
May 4: Accepted GSoC students/projects are announced
May 4 - 29: Community Bonding Period
May 30: Coding begins
June 26-30: First evaluation period - mentors evaluate students, students evaluate mentors
July 24 - 28: Second evaluation period - mentors evaluate students, students evaluate mentors
August 21- 29: Students wrap up their projects and submit final evaluation of their mentor
August 29 - September 5: Mentors submit final evaluations of students
September 6: Students passing GSoC 2017 are announced

Mentors Mailing List

If you want to be included on the GSoC mentors mailing list be sure to opt in on your User Profile page. We will add anyone who has opted in to the list every few days for the next month. And then every couple of weeks throughout the program. You can always opt out once you have been added by unsubscribing using the link on any of the emails.

Contact Us

Please use the gsoc-support@google.com email address for questions so that anyone on our team can answer your question for you.

We look forward to working with all of you over these next 6 months! Thanks again for being a mentor for GSoC 2017!

Google Open Source Programs Office