Getting Our Community Ready for GSoC 2022

Google is making some exciting changes to Summer of Code this year.

  • Expanding eligibility to newcomers 18 years and older, so GSoC is no longer limited to students. GSoC Contributors may now be people at different stages of their career, looking for a change, or returning to the workforce will now be able to participate.
  • Support for medium (~175 hours) and large (~350 hours) projects.
  • Option to extend the project period. Mentors and GSoC Contributors can decide if their project can be completed in the standard 12 week project period - or if they want to extend it up to 22 weeks.

What does this mean for OpenMRS?

GSoC has always been a great way to introduce programming students to OpenMRS. Many GSoCers have gone on to become valued members of our community and/or have amazing careers with OpenMRS implementers (@rafal @k.joseph @mozzy @suthagar23 immediately come to mind).

Google’s changes to GSoC mean that we now have a chance to attract and work with more experienced developers - and possibly fill out the middle of our talent pipeline. This also means that we can consider projects that we might not have been able to propose for GSoC in the past because they were too big or advanced.

Let’s make GSoC 2022 even better with

  • Strong projects that have a clear benefit to implementations (focus on project quality rather than quantity)
  • Motivated GSoCers with the right skill base and interest in becoming a part of our community for the long term
  • Committed mentors with the right skills and experience

What’s next?

Organization applications will open in February. So here are four questions related to the above to help us get going:

1. Project ideation. Anyone have any projects already in mind? Any squads with potential projects? What about implementations? Here is a link to our GSoC Project Creation Guidelines if you want to know more about the attributes of a great GSoC project (or if you have additional attributes to propose).

2. Mentor Matching. How might we match and support mentors so that we have the right primary and backup mentors with the right technical skills for the right project?

3. GSoC Contributor Recruitment. Other than the GSoC 2022 site, how or where might we recruit mid-level talent to participate in GSoC?

4. GSoC Admins Guidelines & Selection. With this year’s changes in mind, we’ll need to update our GSoC Admin Guideline for 2022. I’ve put last year’s guidelines from the Wiki into a Google document so that we can all make changes and/or additions easily. And if you were a GSoC Admin in the past or if you are interested in becoming one this year (or in the future), I highly encourage you to share your ideas for improvement and help us update these guidelines! More about nominating and selecting GSoC 2022 Admins to come.

Super excited for GSoC this year!

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Thanks @jennifer for putting up this together

cc @herbert24 @sharif

How can I work on a project which is no unasinged