Last week, as I was writing my trip report about the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit, I found myself going on a tangent about the program in our community, so I decided to split the content off into a couple of posts. In this post, I want to elaborate a bit on our goal with the program and how intern selection helps us with that.
I have long been saying that GSoC is not a “pay-for-code” program for GNOME. It is an opportunity to bring new contributors to our community, improve our projects, and sustain our development model.
Mentoring is hard and time consuming. GNOME Developers heroically dedicate hours of their weeks to helping new people learn how to contribute.
Our goal with GSoC is to attract contributors that want to become GNOME Developers. We want contributors that will spend time helping others learn and keep the torch going.
Merge-requests are very important, but so are the abilities to articulate ideas, hold healthy discussions, and build consensus among other contributors.
For years, the project proposal was the main deciding factor for a contributor to get an internship with GNOME. That isn’t working anymore, especially in an era of AI-generated proposals. We need to up our game and dig deeper to find the right contributors.
This might even mean asking for fewer internship slots. I believe that if we select a smaller group of people with the right motivations, we can give them the focused attention and support to continue their involvement long after the internship is completed.
My suggestion for improving the intern selection process is to focus on three factors:
- History of Contributions in gitlab.gnome.org: applicants should solve a few ~Newcomers issues, report bugs, and/or participate in discussions. This gives us an idea of how they perform in the contributing process as a whole.
- Project Proposal: a document describing the project’s goals and detailing how the contributors plans to tackle the project. Containing some reasonable time estimates.
- An interview: a 10 or 15 minutes call where admins and mentors can ask applicants a few questions about their Project Proposal and their History of Contributions.
The final decision to select an intern should be a consideration of how the applicant performed across these aspects.
Contributor selection is super important, and we must continue improving our process. This is about investing in the long-term health and sustainability of our project by finding and nurturing its future developers.
If you want to find more about GSoC with GNOME, visit gsoc.gnome.org