5:34 p.m.
Hi, XEmacsers
Applications for mentoring organizations in Google Summer of Code are
open. I am interested in mentoring students working on XEmacs, and
would like to apply for XEmacs as an organization.
Dealing with this is pretty urgent, as applications close on March 29
at 19:00 UTC.
I need at least two, preferably three, positive and definite responses
on the organization administrator and backup mentors (see 1 and 3
below) to go forward. (If we can't scratch together three people for
backups in addition to a primary admin/mentor, we're hardly an
organization!)
In order to apply as an organization, we need a few things, as
follows:
1. An organization administrator or backup administrator. The duties
are fairly light, and I am willing to serve in one role or the
other. I would prefer being backup, as there's a potential
conflict of interest (I want to mentor, and the administrator is
the first arbitrator in student-mentor conflicts).
2. One mentor per planned slot. Unless there's an amazing outpouring
of support for the idea, I would guess 1, maybe 2 slots are all we
can handle. Since I would like to mentor, we don't necessarily
need another primary mentor volunteer. Also, co-mentoring is
possible. N.B. Mentors need to provide contact information (email
and phone, and IRC is a common medium for remote mentoring).
3. Two or three backup mentors in case a primary mentor becomes
unavailable for some reason. The reason for planning for excess
redundancy now is to allow some flexibility in that unlikely event,
and because it would allow us to take on one more student than
planned if there's a really good opportunity.
4. An ideas page. I propose to grab some of the stuff from Ben's
Architecting XEmacs and Jamie's wish list, but I'd like review as
to the size of projects in the list so we can strike off projects
that are too big or too small (the Ideas Page is one of the primary
resources for evaluation as a GSoC mentoring organization, so it
should match GSoC well). A GSoC project needs to be pretty
substantial: the student is expected to put in about 400 hours in
the summer.
There are some other administrative details in the application, but I
can handle those.
Let me know if you're willing to help as soon as possible!
Steve
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6:12 p.m.
On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 11:34 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen(a)xemacs.org> wrote:
Let me know if you're willing to help as soon as possible!
I don't think I have sufficient free time to be a mentor, but I'm
willing to be a backup mentor.
What are these "light duties" of the organization administrator?
--
Jerry James
http://www.jamezone.org/
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2:55 a.m.
Jerry James writes:
On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 11:34 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<stephen(a)xemacs.org> wrote:
> Let me know if you're willing to help as soon as possible!
I don't think I have sufficient free time to be a mentor, but I'm
willing to be a backup mentor.
Great!
What are these "light duties" of the organization
administrator?
The org admin is responsible for
1. Applying to Google by Friday. I'll do that, it's easy enough to
change the nominal admin later, I believe, especially if the point
is to avoid somebody doing both admin and mentor simultaneously.
2. "Quickly" reviewing evaluations of students for fairness at midterm
(July 29--August 2, nominally, but we should have a good idea of
where things are going by mid-July) and summer end (September
23--27, same kind of caveat). Mentors and students don't see each
others' evaluations (unless mentor == org admin -- I think you see
why I don't want to do both mentor and org admin!), so this is the
only way to get an idea of whether the mentor and the student are
one the same page, and that's really all you need to do. It's an
essential job, but each evaluation is less than one 24x80 screen's
worth, usually quite a bit less I think.
3. First level arbitration of disputes between mentor and student
about evaluations. (Final arbitration is done by Google staff.) I
had a bad student last year in Mailman; he complained about the
schedule (there's a bad conflict with German universities, at
least), but didn't complain about the evaluation. I hear one case
went to arbitration last summer, but I think it's very rare, even
when real jerks are involved on one side or the other.
4. Tracking down (and replacing, if necessary) mentors who go AWOL.
This shouldn't happen, of course.
5. Kicking mentors to track down students who go AWOL. This does
happen, but the first line of responsibility is the mentor, not the
org admin.
6. Submitting final organization evaluation (not sure of the content
of this, but it's not huge) September 23--27. Probably I can write
that, but maybe it requires access to student evaluations, in which
case I'd rather not if I'm a mentor.
7. Point of contact for GSoC staff.
8. (Optional) Mentor Summit-and-Pool-Party at Google Mountain View in
October. ;-)
Org admin for large umbrella organizations (Python Software
Foundation, Apache Foundation) is a pretty big (and political ;-)
deal, I gather, but for one-project orgs like XEmacs, with no need to
allocate slots across multiple somewhat independent subprojects, it's
not much effort, even in evaluation periods.
Steve
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7:57 a.m.
Stephen J. Turnbull writes:
I need at least two, preferably three, positive and definite
responses
on the organization administrator and backup mentors (see 1 and 3
below) to go forward.
I've got two mentors/backup mentors and one maybe for the (backup) org
admin. However, there's only two individuals involved....
One more maybe on the backup admin and I'm happy. That plus a backup
mentor and I'll be in clover. Anybody?
Steve
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12:39 a.m.
>>>> Stephen J Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
One more maybe on the backup admin and I'm happy. That plus a
backup mentor and I'll be in clover. Anybody?
If I read the schedule right the work seems to be concentrated to the
middle of my summer holidays. Doesn't seem serious to step up
then. Sorry.
(I'm also a bit uncertain of what is required of an admin although I
read your long and detailed description. Language difficulties I'm
afraid)
Yours
--
%% Mats
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8:29 a.m.
Mats Lidell writes:
>>>>> Stephen J Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org>
writes:
If I read the schedule right the work seems to be concentrated to
the
middle of my summer holidays. Doesn't seem serious to step up
then. Sorry.
I would think that would be the perfect time. ;-) But, seriously, no
need to apologize. If you have time to hang around XEmacs channels
during the summer, that would be great.
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11:09 p.m.
>>>> Stephen J Turnbull <stephen(a)xemacs.org> writes:
I would think that would be the perfect time. ;-) But, seriously, no
need to apologize. If you have time to hang around XEmacs channels
during the summer, that would be great.
I try to stick around all the time but during summer there can be
times where I won't even be online for days (scary isn't it ;-) But if
I'm there I'll try to help out of course.
Yours
--
%% Mats
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