Its working basically like this: We apply as an organization, if Google accepts us they will pay people we pick to work on scoped projects. This year they started to open this program for all people above 18, before only students were accepted. Read their full announcement here: Expanding Google Summer of Code in 2022 | Google Open Source Blog
Joining the programme has the great benefit of having dedicated contributors. This may make it possible to tackle one bigger project or multiple smaller ones that others might be less inclined to pick up. The ‘downside’ of this is that we’d need to commit to mentoring this person.
Here's what Google expects from a mentor
Mentor: Mentors are people from the community who volunteer to work with a GSoC contributor. Mentors provide guidance such as pointers to useful documentation, code reviews, etc. In addition to providing GSoC contributors with feedback and pointers, a mentor acts as an ambassador to help GSoC contributors integrate into their project’s community. Some organizations choose to assign more than one mentor to each of their GSoC contributors. Many members of the community provide guidance to their project’s GSoC contributors without mentoring in an “official” capacity, much as they would answer anyone’s questions on the project’s mailing list or chat channel. Source
They also require an ‘org admin’ to do the boring stuff plus supporting mentors and contributors. I wouldn’t mind taking this up on me.
The deadline for applications is in a week and a half - tight but possible
Are there any people that would be willing to step up as mentor (specifically for anything related to actual development)? If so, we gotta select some ideas the contributor(s) might work on.
I’m not sure I have enough time to mentor someone working on AntennaPod full-time. The mentoring guidelines say that one should spend about 1 hour a day reviewing. While I do spend more than that on AntennaPod (on average), I fear it could be a bit much to really commit on the time.
K-9 mail also had a GSoC student at some point and unfortunately it never got merged into the full app because it was a huge amount of changes. Reviewing got more and more delayed. Now the whole app got re-written and the PR got closed
Do you have specific ideas what could be done? My only idea would be the home screen but that one already has a PR. It “just” needs to be completed
I do like the idea, though. I mentored a few Hackathons and liked it. Doing something similar over a longer time could be a great learning opportunity for me as well. So I am a bit unsure if I want to be a mentor
I understand. I guess the 1 hour per day is in case it’s a ‘big’ project (350 contributor hours) in the shortest coding period (12 weeks). But we could also go for the opposite: a small project (175 hours) over a longer coding period (max. 22 weeks). That would boil down to about 8 hours contributor work per week - meaning less than 1 hour mentoring per week. And there’s a flexibility in terms of planning ‘weeks off’.
Then, there’s also the flexibility to share the mentoring role. I would like to take up the mentoring regarding the project (esp. during the ‘community bonding period’) and UX/UI. So we can share the burden.
Ouch, yeah, that’s something we really don’t want. That’d be a grand waste of time for everyone.
Just to jot down some ideas - some from what I believe are popular requests, some from my personal wishlist
Episode listening without subscribing (incl opening shared episode) [#4710]
Upgrade ‘New’ screen to ‘Inbox’ [#5267]
User-definable queues [#2648]
Nice empty-state screens, other UI refinements
Rewrite of auto download/deletion (including oldest to newest, keeping N newest) [this milestone]
Revamped discovery screen (to be seen if country-based suggestions possible with PI’s - support for tag/topic filtering (even based on iTunes) would be welcome) [#4747, might also cover #5373]
Experimental/Optional bottom bar navigation [#4376]
Support for Transcript tag [#4935] & related enhancement of player screen navigation [on forum]
Time selector in statistics [#5102] + ‘your year in review’ as added bonus
Episode-based notes [#1946]
Multi-press hardware buttons (e.g. to fast forward) [#2715]
Continue playing when initiated from Podcast or Tag [#1533]
Further increase chapter support (button for ‘more info’ link)
Cross-app comments (based on ActivityPub protocol)
Support for Alternate enclosure tag
Support for Person tag (mainly episode/podcast search)
I guess this is plenty to fill 175 hours I realise that some of the above points would need decisions and/or mock-ups first. But if we know what we want to ask the GSoC contributor, we still have a few months to discuss them
I think we should make a decision latest the coming weekend, so that we have a week to prepare the application (determine the project ideas).
I realise that some of the above points would need decisions and/or mock-ups first. But if we know what we want to ask the GSoC contributor, we still have a few months to discuss them