With Rails Girls Summer of Code (#rgsoc) and Google Summer of Code (#gsoc) 2019 coming up, we're looking ahead to who may be interested in mentoring for these programs. We have participated in both during the past few years, and while we are not guaranteed spots, we are planning to apply as an organization.

Read some of last year's proposals here, and participate in project idea brainstorming here. If one of the project ideas strikes your interest, please mention it!

We especially welcome people from groups underrepresented in free and open source software!

It's very important to us to have diverse representation in our mentor group just as in our participant group. And remember -- our community aspires to be a respectful place. Please read and abide by our Code of Conduct.

To participate:

This year, we're asking that mentors have taken some of the following steps to be part of our community:

1. Solve a first-timers issue. Provide the link to the first timer issue's pull request (PR) once it's merged. In case, you are not able to find any first-timer issue, solve issue marked as fto-candidate or support, these issues may require little more work, but we'll try to help.
2. Solve a help-wanted issue. Help wanted issues are issues which are not labelled as gci-candidate neither as fto-candidate nor as first-timer-only. Provide link to such issues' merged PR. (Make sure you claim the issue first by commenting on issue you are planning to solve)
3. make a first-timers issue. Use the extra friendly template which we generally use for creating our first timer issues. Provide the link to the first timer issue which is created by you.

Mentors check in with a student at least once per week roughly from May-August, and offer some project management guidance and encouragement... while relying on the chatroom, the plots-dev list and the @publiclab/reviewers group on GitHub to provide code-specific input, so that we share the burden of specific technical support. We have weekly Check-Ins on GitHub as well, and mentors are expected (along with students!) to be in the rotation to post these occasionally.

Remember that to be a mentor you don't necessarily need to know how to code -- we also need mentors who know Public Lab's community and practices well, and who can encourage students to speak up when they get stuck, and to ask the community for input and testing of their work. Students often get stuck when they don't know how something should look, or how a feature might be used by the community -- contextual info!

If you're interested in being a mentor, leave a comment here -- and read over our software outreach resources to get an idea of how we work!

Some key resources on mentoring:

• read over our Summer of Code workflow here
• read these extra notes on our approach here
• read different ways to mentor in this post -- we need various types!
• read about what reviewers do day-to-day on Public Lab code projects
• read about our commitment to modularity, very important in how we ask contributors to work
• check out our growing list of software outreach strategies

Thanks a lot, and we're happy to answer questions!