[tug-summer-of-code] GSOC Final Mentor Program Survey

[Jonathan Fine]

Here are my answers to the survey results.

Jonathan

1. How much time have you spent working on Summer of Code tasks that did 
not include mentoring your own student since the midterm evaluation, 
e.g. mentoring other students, program administration, writing new 
developer documentation?
0 - 5 hours per week
Comments:
I spent quite a lot of time establishing the software context within 
which I wanted my student to work. Mostly, this was writing JavaScript 
utilities and tools. It also included finding out exactly how JavaScript 
did things. I estimate the time spent doing this as 5 hours a week over 
the whole project, but some weeks it was more like 6 or 8.


2. If there was one thing you wish you had known before getting started 
in Summer of Code, what would it be? (required)

This project was to write JavaScript for using TeX as a web service. 
Myself, the organisation and the student knew a lot about TeX, but not 
that much about JavaScript. I wish I knew ahead of time just how many 
difficulties there are in writing good JavaScript code. I knew there 
were problems, but I did not appreciate the extent of them. There seem 
to be so many gotchas in the language itself, let alone its relationship 
to the DOM.

3. If there was one thing you wish your students had known before 
getting started in Summer of Code, what would it be? (required)

I can speak here only for my own project - mathtran-javascript. I think 
it would have helped if my student had known more about object oriented 
programming.

4. Given your experience this year, would you change your applicant 
selection process should you participate in a future Summer of Code?
Our selection process worked very well for us and we would not change it.
We would do things differently next year.
Comments:
I'd like to make some small changes and perhaps one or two big changes. 
See my answers to the other questions for details.


5. Please describe your applicant selection process. (required)

I was not involved in TUG's GSOC program from the beginning. My 
understanding of what happened is as follows. TUG became a mentoring 
organisation because two persons associated with TUG wished to 
participate in GSOC as students. Much to the credit of TUG, and 
particularly its president (Karl Berry), TUG applied to be a mentoring 
organisation and put out a call for projects. At this point I added 
mathtran-javascript to the list of project ideas, and several students 
applied. As I recall, it became clear fairly soon that the top three 
projects were those of the two students who approached TUG, and mine. 
For the former, there was effectively only one student applicant. For 
mathtran-javascript there were several strong student candidates, and 
almost entirely the decision there was mine. At this point we want to 
know how many slots Google would give us. If it was less than three then 
we would have to make some hard decisions. Fortunately, we did get three.

6. What would you do differently for future instances of Summer of Code 
should you participate again? (required)

I would like to seek and publicise project ideas well in advance of the 
application deadlines. I'd also be pleased if TUG and the TeX users 
community were to discuss what the software developments needs were. I'd 
also like to link up early with other potential mentoring organisations 
who were doing related work.

7. What worked very well for your organization? (required)

I think the discussion between the project mentors went fairly well. 
This is TUG's first year in GSOC, and so as a result I don't think there 
was anything that worked very well. The GSOC web pages and forms (such 
as this one) worked well.

8. What advice would you give to future would-be Summer of Code 
mentoring organizations? (required)

Start as early as you can, as solicit input from across the whole 
community of users. Even if this does not directly contribute to the 
GSOC participation, it will bring other benefits. Make contact with 
other organisations in related areas who have already participated in GSOC.

9. What advice would you give to future would-be Summer of Code students 
who would like to work with your organization? (required)

I think there's a lot that needs to be done in bringing the TeX 
community up to date with recent developments in the internet and web 
pages. So I'd like to see projects along the lines, say, of setting up a 
Django-based (that's my preference) TeX community web site. Or paste 
bins and source code syntax highlighters. Therefore, my advice is this. 
Don't worry that you don't know a great deal about TeX (although such 
knowledge will always be helpful). Rather, think about the skills that 
you do have, and how they might help the TeX community.

10. Please indicate the prior years in which you have participated in 
Google Summer of Code (check all that apply). Select the first choice 
("2008 is my first year participating in Summer of Code") *only* if you 
have *not* participated in Google Summer of Code in years prior to 2008.
2008 is my first year participating in Summer of Code.


11. Please indicate how you participated previously in Summer of Code 
(check all that apply).
I did not participate previously in Google Summer of Code.


12. Please describe your past SoC participation in detail. If you did 
not participate previously, please write in "Not applicable". (required)
Not applicable.

13. Would you like to recieve the program t-shirt? (Please note: Unless 
you answer yes here, you will not receive the Summer of Code 2008 
t-shirt. Believe it or not, some people don't want them. No, we will not 
send you a shirt that someone else refuses.)
Yes