[ros-dev] Report from the GSoC Mentor Summit 2019

[Colin Finck]

Hi all!

Victor and me are having a good time at this year's GSoC Mentor Summit
in Munich, and it's time to get out a first report.
Again, I'm getting the impression that all projects here pretty much
share the same problems and ReactOS is not doing anything particular
wrong. Today, I have attended a session about keeping students involved
after GSoC. Most projects are struggling with that and there were some
projects where it's usual for all students to just stay for GSoC and
immediately leave afterwards.

Anyway, I took some insights where we can improve to keep more of our
students:

  * Give students some responsibility early on, so they feel responsible
    and needed for a project even after GSoC.
    The ultimate goal should be to turn them into mentors later. We
    already have a fairly good track record of that, but I think it
    should be emphasized here.

  * Invite more students to our Hackfest. We may need to postpone it by
    a few weeks to not clash with the final days of GSoC.
    For the MacPorts project, this resulted in all 3 students staying
    with the project after GSoC.

  * Talk to students on a personal level (possibly even through audio or
    video chat) and get them into our community.
    We had some high-performing students in the past who needed almost
    no mentoring, but this also resulted in less interactions with the
    community and we had a hard time to keep them involved after GSoC.

  * Collect tasks all year long, not just shortly before GSoC. This is
    important not just for keeping students, but also for enabling our
    paid development ideas around ReactOS.
    It's still important to ask a student what he or she wants to work
    on after GSoC, but we should always have some interesting tasks
    available.

  * Advertise our scholarship model early enough during GSoC to keep the
    people that are also doing it for the money.

  * Advertise our GSoC participation at universities. Some students
    managed to declare their GSoC participation as the technical
    internship required for their studies.

All in all, the Mentor Summit again was a great opportunity to meet up
with fellow Open-Source developers all around the world and have some
interesting discussions. I'm already looking forward to the next one!
We even got some ReactOS work done
<https://github.com/reactos/reactos/pull/1835> just in sight distance of
the Microsoft Germany HQ :D

Cheers,

Colin