Hi to Gaurav, Ricardo and Varad!
I've just made sure that you're all signed up for the mailing list here. By all means change your subscriptions to use a more-preferred email address, but please stay subscribed somehow as this is the easiest way to get in touch.
First of all, congratulations on being accepted for the Google Summer of Code 2014 and welcome to Linaro! Now the real hard work starts... :-)
Today (22nd April) is the start of the bonding period. You're strongly encouraged to get to know your mentors and prepare for your summer project. Exactly what that entails is up to you and your mentors, but try to spend some time and be ready. It's also worth signing up for other Linaro mailing lists related to your project, and please join us on the various IRC channels too if you can. freenode.org, #linaro-gsoc is a good place to be.
Timings =======
Google's timeline page at
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/events/google/gsoc2014
is an important thing to use - it contains all the key dates for the summer. Key highlights:
* 22nd April - Bonding period start * 19th May - Official project start * 27th June - Midterm evaluation deadline * 11th August - Suggested "pencils down" date * 22nd August - Final evaluation deadline, code submissions to Google
Resources =========
We have a GSOC-specific wiki set up at
with some boiler-plate text in place so far. Hopefully you *should* be able to register for accounts and add some text about yourselves and your projects now. Please try and do that ASAP, and let me know if you have any problems with that.
I'd like to encourage you to post to the Linaro mailing lists, and definitely to blog about what you're working on! planet.linaro.org is our obviously-named blog aggregator - please point me at your Linaro-related feeds and I'll get you added there.
In terms of code hosting, please work out with your mentors the best system / place to do that. Your code needs to be public, so obvious possibilities are places like github.
If you've got random questions that you're not sure who to ask, please ask here on the linaro-gsoc list, or on IRC, or we have a more generic linaro-mentors mailing list (and matching #linaro-mentors IRC channel) too.
Reporting =========
On top of the mandatory mid-term and final evaluations that Google require, once you've started the main coding phase we will ask you to send in a weekly progress report describing how you're getting on. Please send them to the mailing list. They don't have to be *vastly* detailed, but please keep us up to date on what you're doing!
Your mentor should be on top of this even more, but how and how often you talk to them is up to you and them to work out - irc, mail, phone, skype, hangouts are all an option here. Your (primary) mentor should also introduce you to secondary mentor(s) in case of vacation etc. - please ask!
Problems? =========
If you have issues, don't get down. Ask us - we're here to help. We don't bite! Obviously, your mentor should be your first port of call if you need anything. If there are problems there, by all means contact me and the other admins:
Steve McIntyre steve.mcintyre@linaro.org Leif Lindholm leif.lindholm@linaro.org Wookey wookey@linaro.org
and we'll do what we can to help. If there's still an issue at that point, please talk to the GSOC admins at Google and they'll help to resolve things.
We're expecting a lot of work from you this summer, but we also understand that you're not that experienced and this could be quite daunting! The main thing is - please stay in touch. If you go quiet and we can't talk to you then that's the worst option.
In case of emergency, let us know. If you haven't already provided them, please give me emergency contact phone numbers privately (or to the list if you're happy for them to be public!). I doubt we'll need them, but it's best to have them *just in case*. I'll happily give you my own number in return.
Finally =======
Welcome aboard! I hope you all have a fun summer and achieve some great results in your projects!
Cheers,