Google Summer of code 2021 is ON (but with changes, be sure to read closely)

I pulled the summary from Stephanie’s email to mentors:

  1. Smaller project size - all students participating in the 2021 program will be working on a 175 hour project (instead of a 350 hr project). This change will also result in a few other changes including the student stipend being cut in half.
  • Currently we are missing out on many wonderful students who could never commit to such a huge project and time commitment but would be great contributors to your community. This is a significant change as we now are no longer strongly encouraging students to focus only on GSoC over their summer. Students have many other responsibilities especially during the pandemic that make it hard for them to spend 30 hours a week on a project.
  • We realize this is going to require all of you to think about smaller projects and update your project ideas which is why we wanted to give you 3+ months to start talking it through with your communities.
  • The mentor stipends will be adjusted to $400 per student mentored. In feedback from the mentor summit it was pointed out that the effort from mentors will not be half as much even though the project size is cut in half so we adjusted from $250 to $400.
  1. Shortened coding period - the coding period will be 10 weeks with a lot more flexibility for the mentor and student to decide together how they want to spread the work out over the summer. Some folks may choose to stick to a 17-18 hour a week schedule with their students, others may factor in a couple of breaks during the program (for student and mentor) and some may have students focus 30 hours a week on their project so they wrap up in 6 weeks. This also makes it a lot easier for students with finals or other commitments (weddings, etc.) to adjust their schedules.
  2. 2 evaluations (instead of 3) - There will be an evaluation after 5 weeks and the final evaluation will take place after the 10th week. We are also no longer requiring students complete their first evaluation (though we encourage them to do so), so if a student doesn’t complete the first evaluation they will not automatically be removed from the program. They are still required to complete the final evaluation.
  3. Eligibility requirements - In 2020 there are many ways students are learning and we want to acknowledge that so we will be allowing students who are 18 years old AND currently enrolled (or accepted into) a post-secondary academic program as of May 17, 2021 or have graduated from a post-secondary academic program between December 1, 2020 and May 17, 2021 to apply to the GSoC program.
  • What this means is that now the program will be open to folks participating in a variety of different academic programs, not just accredited university programs. This includes licensed coding camps, community colleges, and many other programs that may not be accredited yet but are post-secondary academic programs.

These changes were made to help find more diverse students who we hope will stay involved in your communities after their GSoC ends. We look forward to these changes and will definitely be getting feedback from all of you as the 2021 program goes on to see what is working and what we should consider adjusting for any possible future program.

The program announcement, timeline, marketing materials (slide deck, flyers), FAQs, and short videos with tips for mentors and students are all available. You’ll also notice the 2020 program has now been archived.

@mentors – Let’s begin thinking about projects that can be scoped to 175 hours of work. We will get a lot of experience levels.

Organization applications open on January 29th.

Blog Post: https://opensource.googleblog.com/2020/10/google-summer-of-code-2021-is-bringing.html

Timeline: https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/timeline

Marketing materials: https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/resources/marketing

FAQs: https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/faq

​This is great, Robby, thank you!

Best,

Sherri

No problem! Let’s all start thinking about project ideas. These changes are going to require us to adjust things a bit, but this does open up the possibility to splitting the projects between multiple students.

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@mentors – start thinking about projects that can be completed in 30 hours per week, in 10 weeks.

Be sure to review my post from October ensuring that our ideas are crafted in conformance with the changes this year:

Let’s discuss them here first.

@mentors this opens up in 3 weeks.

Can we have a scrum meeting on the LibreHealth chat sometime this week or weekend to work on discussing the projects? Maybe even have interested students to help scope the projects?

Sure – I have some ideas – we can also do a video call or something. Rocket Chat allows that.

We have had students coming in at a healthy pace now, we need to start thinking of ideas. We are also lacking a place for students to go and tasks for them to work on to evaluate their skills.

I believe strongly that we need to evaluate coding skills and filter out students likely to fail.

cc: @sunbiz @judywawira @pri2si17 @Darshpreet2000 @shbucher1 @mua_rachmann and any other @mentors are welcome.

Sure, I will create beginner friendly issues in cost of care mobile and web app as a task for other students.

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I moved some of 2020 projects over ideas that were not completed over:

  1. Project: Build LibreHealth Toolkit on top of HAPI FHIR

  2. Project: Complete UI rewrite or radiology and toolkit as an open web application

  3. Project: Incorporate reporting workflow into Radiology

  4. Project: Create web components for FHIR Resources

Added Project: Improve LibreHealth Toolkit Cost of Care Explorer

Moved over Project: Android application for birth registration & newborn health data tracking

cc @iainbarclay @shbucher

Not sure if you want to carry this over but it’s an option

Thanks, @r0bby ! Discussing the way forward with @sunbiz , given the new GSoC framework, and our current project streams.

Let me know if you want me to withdraw the ones I ported over.

Hi @r0bby - we definitely wouldn’t reuse the project descriptions from previously, are currently scoping out something, will let you know when it has taken shape…

I got rid of it. I was going through things as I needed to have something for our GSoC 2021 organization application.

Org application started – we can still edit – I guessed on the success rates over the years we’ve done GSoC. Let me know if I made mistakes.

@judywawira and @sunbiz: you have been invited as org admins.

Move discussion to LibreHealth application for Google Summer of Code 2021 completed