Re: Fwd: GSoC 2012: Mentor application?

[Dave Hall]

On 30/03/12 18:05, LRN wrote:
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> On 30.03.2012 8:46, Micah Cowan wrote:
> > On 03/26/2012 06:32 AM, LRN wrote:
> > > That's right. Remember, mentors receive money from Google too!
> > > So they go through the same registration hassle as students, and
> > > a mentor is later formally associated with its student (mentors
> > > who get no students don't get paid).
> > This is a bit misleading, especially on this list. Orgs get paid,
> > not mentors. Some orgs redistribute this money to the mentors; GNU
> > hasn't generally done this.
> That is sad :( For all their hard work mentors deserve to be rewarded.
> Oh, well, i stand corrected then.
As a former mentor, I disagree.  Yes mentoring takes time and effort, 
but so does onboarding any new contributor.  When I was mentoring we had 
a 50% retention rate from GSoC students - which was better than most 
people who got commit access.

These days I do a lot of work with Drupal and they've had quite a few of 
their students grow into senior members of the community.  This is what 
should happen with GSoC students.

I think if being a mentor was going to result in you incurring real 
tangible additional financial costs then you could approach one of the 
coordinators before signing up to see if those costs could be reimbursed 
(up to 500).  I'm not sure what those costs would be - there is no 
travel required, irc is free and it is possible to free software to make 
video and voice calls for free over the internet.

Students get paid so they chose GSoC over some unpaid summer intern gig 
or making coffees for minimum wages.  From what I know the vast majority 
of mentors are working full time or running successful businesses.  I 
think n x 500USD is a lot more useful in the FSF's pocket than in a 
bunch of  mentors' pockets.

Cheers

Dave