Heya all, You might know that Mighty Google spends millions each year sponsoring IT students to work 3 months full time on cool Free Software projects? You should try and get some of that $$ to be poured into a project you love! If you'd like an IT student to work on something for 12 weeks, add the project idea to http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GSOC_2012_Ideas and be sure to add your name as potential mentor. GSOC myths and reality check: *MYTH*: The students don't work very hard *REALITY*: You have every right to expect them to put in effort: it is a FULL- TIME gig, 3 months, quite well paid. So if THEY don't put in work, neither should you - and let them fail. But most students are quite eager and work hard. *MYTH*: The students know nothing *REALITY*: While some students are real beginners, decent student selection should prevent this. You have a say in this - and you'll have plenty of interactions with potential students before they are chosen as they have to work with you on a good proposal. *MYTH*: The students do it just for the monies *REALITY*: Not more or less than you work for yours. GSOC is meant to replace a summer job, so yes, the students get paid. That also means they have to work for it - 40 hours a week is expected at least. And I'd expect more even... *MYTH*: Mentoring is so much work, it is easier to do the stuff yourself *REALITY*: The students get selected on the quality of the proposals they wrote together with the mentors and are expected to work 40 hours a week. You're expected to mentor: check up at least once a week (make them write a weekly blog about their progress! You're the boss, remember) and answer some questions. Not do their work for them. The oS GSOC team will help you in case you get in trouble - but really, if the student does less work than you put in, he either took on something insanely complicated (bad selection!) or you're being far too nice. It will take some hours, but most of that is easy - a quick IRC chat, pointing to some documentation, reading a weekly report, reviewing a merge request (but that's something you'd do anyway, right?). Read more in the news article: http://news.opensuse.org/2012/02/29/opensuse-gsoc-2012/ And our wiki: http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GSOC_2012 Our GSOC star team this year consists of: Vincent "vuntz" Untz Pavol "prusnak" Rusnak Manu "manugupt1" Gupta* Please ask them questions, even if you don't have any. They love attention ;-) Have a lot of fun, Jos *In hugging and kicking capacity, he might be a student and you can't be both organizer and student. But he knows everything so you can ask him what you want to know and he'll tell you :D