GSoC Community Bonding Period

I am sorry for the delay in the blog posts, I was neglecting the publishing the posts which are in my drafts.

tldr; Participated in Community Bonding of Fedora and FAD.

In my previous post I have mentioned about getting select for GSoC 2016 and this is the this years schedule https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/how-it-works/ and https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/timeline

 

Here is the email that google sends to the mentors, I got it via internal mailing list of FOSS@Amrita

Community Bonding Period
As part of the student’s acceptance into GSoC they are expected to actively participate in theCommunity Bonding period (April 22 – May 22). The Community Bonding period is intended to get students ready to start contributing to your organization full time in May.

Unfortunately, some students think their acceptance into GSoC guarantees them the initial $500 payment. That is not the case. A student does not receive $500 just for writing a good proposal. They must be active in the Community Bonding period to earn that $500.

Community Bonding activities may involve:

• Becoming familiar with the community practices and processes. (This often involves a mix of observation and participation.)
• Participating on Mailing Lists / IRC / etc. (Not just lurking.)
• Setting up their development environment.
• Small (or large) patches/bug fixes. (These do not need to be directly related to their GSoC project.)
• Participating in code reviews for others. (Even someone who isn’t familiar with the project can contribute by pointing out potential inefficiencies, bad error handling, etc.)
• Working with their mentor and other org members on refining their project plan. This might include finalizing deadlines and milestones, adding more detail, figuring out potential issues, etc.
• If the student is already familiar with the organization, they could be helping others get involved in the community.
• Reading (and updating!) documentation they will need to understand to complete their project.
• Reporting or replicating bugs.

Active means active. Students have committed to the program schedule, and we would like you to hold them to it. There is no simple standard, as every org is different, every student has different time constraints, and there are many different ways to interact. Some students may require coaxing and encouragement in order to get them to actively participate.

If you do not see regular public interaction from the student, you should strongly encourage it. Public is important — it is a key principle of open source — work happens where everyone can see it. Similarly, all work done by the students should be shared in a publicly available repository.

By May 16th if the student has not been active in Community Bonding please notify Google at gsoc-support@google.com to let us know. After a brief investigation, we may remove the student from the program. They will not receive any payments.

Do not feel bad about “failing” a student.
The past eleven years of GSoC have demonstrated that students who don’t interact early and often are more likely to fail later. Often they just disappear. We don’t want you to waste your time on students who don’t care about the project/organization and can’t even attempt to show interest these first few weeks of the program. Small contributions early on are often a very positive signal.

Organizations will not be penalized for failing students who are not fulfilling their responsibilities during the Community Bonding period. We expect there to be students who fail this Community Bonding period, just like we expect there to be some students who fail the midterm and others that fail the final. This is completely normal.

So it basically means actively participating in the community via IRC mailing list etc..

This is also the time of my exams of so it’s very tough to spend time because of the exam fever and all stuff, but I did mostly actively participate in the IRC meeting that we have weekly https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Docs_Project_meetings , there are is also a mailing list for fedora-docs (https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/docs@lists.fedoraproject.org/) but wasn’t much active in it. Also there are office hours but it’s for the USA schedule here https://apps.fedoraproject.org/calendar/docs/ fedocal (one more awesome app from the fedora-app team).

I was also active in CommOps team’s mailing list and IRC 🙂

FAD

FAD stands for Fedora Activity Day like the sprints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_(software_development) here is the wiki page https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Fedora_Activity_Day_-_FAD

Fedora-docs team planned one for 2016 more details (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FAD_Documentation_2016) and it went all well and I have take part in the remotely along with linuxmodder and other

I took part in it some time but couldn’t follow well because of the bandwidth issues and with my microphone. I was communication via IRC.

Here is the complete report https://communityblog.fedoraproject.org/event-report-fedora-docs-fad/ and we have decided to use asciidoc for the source and pintail for building the html.

I have also got a cool badge for attending this FAD remotely. https://badges.fedoraproject.org/badge/docs-fad-2016

Goals for GSoC

Since the tools were decided in FAD. My mentor zolesby and me decided the goals for my project https://pagure.io/docs-fp-o/issues?assignee=dhanvi

Packaging 2 packages is my goal (hope I can full fill it ) And continuous integration and continuous deployment is second half of the project.

That’s all guys wait for my further blog posts for updates on GSoC.