Student Programs Administration
Student Programs administrators run the mentoring programs for KDE, sometimes in partnership with other groups such as Google Open Source and companies who wish to sponsor interns through KDE rather than directly. We work as a group, collaboratively, supporting those who take the lead for a particular program. New admins are always welcome.
For the following programs, we've tried to list the tasks necessary. This will be a work in progress as we develop best practices.
Google Summer of Code
- During the fall and winter, prepare curious students and prospective mentors for the beginning of GSoC
- Ensure that https://community.kde.org/GSoC is all up-to-date. Discuss changes on the KDE-Soc-Mentors list
- Start a new Ideas page, and begin contacting teams to get them to list and refine their ideas
- Continue to urge students to read the documentation and get in contact with a team who can help them make their first commits/bug fixes
- Decide who will write the Org application, and get it finished before the deadline
- Prepare the spreadsheet for listing the student applications, and get the teams to rank them
- Ensure that all mentors are subscribed to KDE-Soc-Mentor and invited to the webapp
- Once all the teams have ranked their students, decide how many slots to ask for in consultation with the rest of the admins
- Once slots are assigned, ensure that all students are subscribed to KDE-Soc mail list, and welcome the students
- Create the student report page, and get them using it from day one
- Continue to stay in touch with the students and mentors during bonding and coding via IRC/Telegram/MLs
- Ensure that mentors meet evaluation deadlines no matter what it takes. Support mentors to fail students when that is necessary
- Help decide which mentors will attend the Mentor Summit
- Create a Dot story reporting on what was accomplished during GSoC
Google Code-in
- Tell the GSoC students that we want them to be GCi mentors, and remind them again as they finish!
- Also remind teams and prospective mentors to begin gathering ideas for tasks
- Create a way to gather early ideas via spreadsheet or form > spreadsheet. These must be present before the Org Application
- File Org application
- Continue to encourage teams to think of more tasks, and urge mentors to join KDE-Soc-Mentor ml -- including former GSoC students
- GCi is shorter but rather intense, so ensure that there are enough admins to cover student work on the webapp, especially on weekends and holidays! Mentors can help there, but there should always be admins to help out the students. Sometimes they just need a word of advice or encouragement.
- At the end of the contest, begin a discussion about how to rank the top students, based on their attitude, creativity and how involved they got with the community rather than the number of tasks they completed.
- Create a poll of the top 10 point-getters on http://civs.cs.cornell.edu and send them out to the mentors, report the tally on the webapp
- Create a Dot story highlighting some of the top students and cool tasks completed
Season of KDE
- Consult with admins to figure out the timeline and begin to work with teams to get ideas germinating
- Ask the VDG to create a tshirt for the students
- Create an Ideas page and announce the timeline to teams and mentors
- Get the seasons app initialized
- Announce the timeline and rules publicly and get mentees (do not have to be enrolled students) connected to mentors and signed up on the app
- Create a Reports wiki for the students -- should include both work and blog posts
- Be available to both mentors and admins during the program
- Collect student information for those who finish, and report results and mailing info to the Board
- Announce the results on the Dot with a roundup of successful projects and students
- Follow up with Board to ensure that the e.V. has sent goodies to students
Outreach Program for Women
We have not done Outreachy for awhile, because there has been no one willing to step forward and raise the money. It could be huge for KDE if we had the leadership, and was successful when we ran it in parallel to GSoC. If we have leadership, we'll come up with a list of tasks.