Informative meeting for mentors of CERN-HSF GSoC 2021

Wednesday 26 May 2021, 17:00 → 18:30 Europe/Zurich

Andrei Gheata (CERN), Antoine Perus (Université Paris-Saclay (FR)), Xavier Valls Pla

17:00 → 17:20 Community bonding & coding periods

HSF has been granted 27 student slots by Google as CERN-HSF umbrella organization in the GSoC 2021 program. We are now in the community bonding period (May 17 – Jun 7), when mentors are supposed to:

• Welcome their students, establishing a regular communication channel. We suggest proposing them a chat on Zoom or similar to bootstrap the process

• Establish regular meetings, communicate regularly by mail/messaging, give students small coding tasks to make sure they will be able to start contributing.

• Discuss/confirm with students the plan of work for their project, in particular, if there are re-adjustments to be made. This is particularly relevant for the projects having two slots this year. Changes must be agreed students and not imposed.

• Integrate the students in your workflow: mailing lists, group meetings, chat/discussion channels. Point them to additional documentation, encourage them to ask questions, and interact with you in this period.

• Make sure they can install and run your software, make PRs, .... If the work requires accounts for running certain CERN services and a lightweight account is not enough, make sure you ask your secretariat to register them as temporary external DIST (you and your student will need to fill this form then ask your secretariat how to submit it). Students can already start doing small coding tasks, depending on their level of integration in the project.

• In case your student is unreachable/silent/inactive during this period, please let us know before June 7.

The coding period this year is split into two parts, (Jun7-Jul16) and (Jul17-Aug23) each ending with a week for evaluations. The detailed timeline is available here

• Students are expected to start executing their project proposals. At this point, students should begin regular check-ins and regular patch submissions.

• Work can be distributed within the 2.5 months coding period to cover the mandatory 175 project hours, as agreed between mentors and students.

• Make sure at least one mentor is available for the student at any time

• Maintain regular contact and meetings with the student

• Discuss early with admins if any problems arise
  Illness, unusual excuses, etc.

• Fail early rather than waiting for the student to eventually "come back"

• Fill evaluations on time, they take 5 minutes to complete! Failing to do so incurs penalties to the Organization. Read the mails sent by the program admins.

• Organize interim presentations to your group and a final presentation

• Think early of possible conferences or venues where work can be presented outside of the group

• Expected commitment: 2-3 hours/week depending on the period of GSoC (usually more in the first few weeks and less in later weeks)

The instructions for the community bonding and coding periods are detailed in the mentor guide

17:20 → 17:50 Q&A session

Time for the mentors to ask any questions about GSoC at CERN-HSF.