Ahmed H. El-Hassany's Blog

Stage Two: Mentoring Organizations is Announced, But Applications didn’t started yet From March 18^th to March 23^rd
First sorry about my mistake on the date for the first stage, the first stage ends on March 18^th not March 13^th. On March 18^th, Google will announce the participating mentoring organizations and their suggested ideas.

1. Go through the mentoring organizations list on http://code.google.com/soc and compare it to you preliminary list.
2. You may find some organizations in your list but it not accepted by Google, Exclude it from your list.
3. Or you may find other organizations are listed you’re more interested on. You can add it to your list. But remember this is semi-final list so don’t make it big I don’t recommend list bigger than five projects and try to select just one project from each organization.
4. It’s OK if all the preliminary list is changed. The goal of the preliminary list is to get you on the mode. But I don’t recommend excluding projects that you send patches to it and these patches where accepted because this mean you already get high possibility to be accepted on that project.
5. Ask the contacts for each project for more information about the project.But don’t ask trivial questions!. Personally I prefer not to ask “What I should go?” or “Can you please give more information about project X?” because this questions show that I don’t understand anything from the listed Idea and I’m waiting the potential mentor to write the proposal for me. But I prefer to think on the idea and put a vision for the project I want to ask about it then go and ask the potential mentor “I have though of doing 1,2,3 for project X” and then ask really smart question about things that was unclear to me.
6. Some project might seem unclear or ambiguous. This might be for two reasons. First, some of the project are intended to be ambiguous because the mentoring organization wants to reveal your innovation. Second, you might don’t have previous experience on the project subject; it’s OK we all here are students and we came to learn new staff, so try to read more about the project and give it some time to think about it. If you have a vision for the project send it to the potential mentor and ask him for his comments, otherwise if you couldn’t put a vision for the project look for another one and don’t worry their is a dozen of projects! But always remember time is critical don’t stuck on one project there is hundreds of ideas and some of it maybe better than you’re currently stuck on.
7. For the ideas on you list try to start put a vision for the projects how it going to be implemented during the summer.
8. Start working on the proposals. It really important if the organization got a template for the proposal that you follow it, but if it don’t have a template try to make your proposal similar to a good template from other organization.
9. Also as the previous stage poke around the mailing list or hang on the IRC channel of the mentoring organizations you are interested on.
10. If the organizations on you short list has created mailing list or IRC channel specially for GSoC  do subscribe on it and use it to ask your *smart question* and to get know the potential mentors.

Good luck everyone with GSoC. It’s competitive and a lot of work but it’s really fun and you will remember these days for the rest of your life.

You can find the list of the accepted metoring organizations on http://socghop.appspot.com/program/accepted_orgs/google/gsoc2009?limit_0=100&limit_1=100

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Google Summer of Code by ahassany