[Xapian-discuss] Google Code-In 2012

[Olly Betts]

As a mentoring org from GSoC, Xapian's eligible to apply for Code-In.
There are some major rule changes this year, which I think make it a
better fit for us, and Guarav asked if we were intending to apply, so
I thought I'd see how much interest there was.

The official site is here:

http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2012

The key points are:

* The new rules strongly encourage students to work primarily with
  one org, and there are no longer cash prizes, which will probably
  mean most students are doing it for the fun, experience and/or
  t-shirt.

* We need a list of tasks which we estimate would take a typical
  Xapian contributor approximately 2 hours to do.  These don't have
  to be just coding (in fact we want a spread over the 5 categories
  they have).

* We need to be able to respond promptly to students submitting
  work (within 36 hours, but obviously less is better).

* The "working period" for students is 26th November to 14th January.

* Org applications close on (remember remember) 5th November.

In order to make it worth applying, I think we need to find out if
we can actually provide the mentoring required.  The contest covers
the holiday period (I'm likely to be away for a week or two of it
myself) so my thought is to have someone "on call" for each day.  If any
tasks can only be mentored by a subset of mentors, then we need to take
that into account too (e.g. by withdrawing them when none of those
mentors are available).

We already have a list of project ideas, and some of the "Bite Size"
ones could be used or adapted to make suitable GCI tasks I think:

http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/ProjectIdeas

We would need more though, and more such ideas are useful to have
anyway, so feel free to propose more.

And if you're interested in mentoring for GCI, please let me know.

Cheers,
    Olly