Merging Fellowship Program Management & GSoC Admin

Community
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Hi everyone,

On a Fellowship Program Management call late last year, @nikeshbalami @Jayasanka @erica @christine myself and a few others discussed what it might look like to merge management and administration of the Fellowship Program & GSoC because there are so many similar and overlapping responsibilities, some even at the same time of year:

  • Supporting mentors
  • Supporting fellows & GSoC contributors
  • Coming up with GSoC projects & Fellowship Capstone projects
  • Assisting with the application & selection process
  • Tracking weekly or bi-weekly blog posts, routine progress reports, etc
  • Liaising with Google or fellowship sponsors/award admins

Instead of having two groups meeting at two different times, we thought it would be helpful for both programs to meet together to manage and administer both programs at the same time.

As a result, our agendas for Monday “Fellowship Program Management” meetings have expanded to include GSoC admin topics & tasks. The team & call name, though, has yet to capture this evolution.

The Asks:

  1. Any feedback or thoughts on merging management of the two programs? Insight into overlapping or unique tasks?
  2. Any ideas or suggestions for re-naming this group & call?
4 Likes
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@jennifer I think this will save lots of time and create more creativity in coming up with the GSoc projects. A brilliant idea

3

I think we can add GSoD administered as well under the same call.

The move looks fine given these programs share similar responsibilities. My thought would be having roles being allocated to the admins.

I think it’s worth renaming the group & call. I suggest we rename it to → 

  Program Management Team

I’m open to other suggestions :smile:

1 Like
4

Thanks for the feedback & suggestions!

@kdaud The thing GSoC and the Fellowship Program have in common is that they are both mentorship programs that have a lot of the same steps. Google treats GSoD as a grant: they give us $$ to hire technical writers to work on our proposed project. So there are fewer steps in common.

If we as a community choose to take a mentorship approach to our GSoD project, then I think it makes sense to have this group & call include the mentorship/fellowship aspects that we introduce into GSoD - and continue to handle the grant management aspect via the Operations call,.

Since this group & call really focuses on mentorship, can we make it a little more specific? Mentorship Program Management? Or Professional Development Program Management?

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I agree with you.