From: Jerry Van Baren <gvb.rbx_at_gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 04 Mar 2008 18:17:30 -0500

Daniel Stenberg wrote:
> Hello!
>
> It is time to apply for becoming a mentoring organization for
> Google's Summer of Code 2008. I've taken the liberty of re-using last
> year's application heavily and adjusted them to this year. Attached
> is my draft for how to respond to the questions.
>
> I'm open for feedback on both content and how it is phrased etc.
> Don't hold on to your comments very long though, since I hope to
> submit this in a few days.
>
> --
> Daniel Stenberg -- http://www.rockbox.org/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/

Hi Daniel,

Here are a few mostly minor English tweaks.

[snip]

> 5. Did your organization participate in previous GSoC years? If so, please
> summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student
> projects. (optional)
>
> We took part of the program last year (2007) in which we got four projects

s/in which we got four projects/in which four of our projects were/

> accepted. Over all I think gsoc2007 gave us a real boost and we learned a lot
> about the progress and how to act as mentors etc to bring with us for this

s/progress/process/ ???

Proposed rephrase of the above sentence:

about the process and how to work as mentors, which will make us even
more effective this

> year. Out of the four projects, one failed. We hope that the experience we got

Out of the four projects, three succeeded.

(our cup is 3/4 full, not 1/4 empty!!!)

> will make all projects we get this year succeed!

Rephrase?
will make all of our GSoC2008 projects succeed!

[snip]

> About Your Mentors
> ==================
>
> 1. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be
> as specific as possible.
>
> All full committers who volunteer are eligible to act as mentors - final
> choices will be made after we have a list of student applicants, so that we
> can choose mentors suited to the specific areas of the projects that are
> actually being accepted.
>
> The volunteering mentors all have many years experience of both the Rockbox
> project as well as indepth knowledge of the source code and general concepts.

s/indepth/in depth/

[snip]

> About The Program
> =================
>
> 1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
>
> We will be requesting that all students communicate with their mentor or the
> project community at least once a week, to ensure that any disappearances or
> falling behind gets noticed promptly.
>
> We will invite and encourage the students to join and participate in the
> community, in the mailing lists, IRC and forums so that they feel a part of
> Rockbox and not something happening on the outside. To reduce the risk of them

s/To reduce the risk/This also reduces the risk/

> disappearing.
>
> 2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
>
> All mentors are full committers, who have maintained a long term association
> with the project. Outright disappearance is therefore vanishingly unlikely.

Hehehe good pun: disappearance / vanishing. :-D

> In case of mentors experiencing unexpected time pressure, the committer
> community provides a large enough pool of potential volunteers that we should
> be able to arrange cover.
>
> We have a large pool of active and skilled project members that should be able
> to cover temporary "outages" of single individual mentors.

s/single//

[snip]

> By mentoring the students into this world and style of acting, we hope that
> they will see and understand the upside of doing it this way and that they

s/upside/benefit/

(no pointy hair bosses or BS bingo around here ;-)

> will then continue doing so even after the project's completion.
>
> 4. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the
> project after GSoC concludes?
>
> We have a set of mentors who act professionally and assist as good as we can

s/good/well/

(IIRC, I'm always a little fuzzy on good vs. well)

> to help the students see the fun in open source hacking our way. We truly
> believe that once they've got their feet wet and got the hang of some of the

s/got/gotten/g

> internals, they too will see the light and will hang around even after this
> summer.

s/hang around/continue to contribute/ ???

HTH,
gvb
Received on 2008-03-05