If you’re interested in applying to be a GSoC Contributor for the Mathesar project, please follow this guide. Thank you in advance for your interest, time, and any contributions you make!
Some things you should know about Mathesar:
Successful applicants will read all available information about Mathesar, be able to understand our codebase without much help, and ask good questions when they do need help. If this doesn’t sound like you, Mathesar may not be the right organization for you.
The Google Summer of Code contributor guide is a great introduction to what goes into being a GSoC Contributor. The rest of this document assumes you’re familiar with its contents.
You’ll need to understand Mathesar well in order to submit a successful application.
Mathesar is a new project and we’re still working towards releasing our first version. The best ways to learn about us is to:
Join the “Mentoring Programs” Matrix channel or the developer mailing list as early as possible to introduce yourself and get feedback on your ideas.
Feel free to ask questions about project ideas, Mathesar, or anything else! Post questions in the main channel - do not contact mentors individually.
You need to make at least one contribution to Mathesar as part of the application process. Your contribution will give us more information about your work/skills and help us evaluate your application. It will also help you learn more about Mathesar and have more information to pick a project idea.
Please see our Contribution Guidelines to learn more about how to contribute.
Once you’re comfortable with Mathesar and the community, it’s time to start the application process.
You’ll need to pick a project that you’re interested in working on. Please see our Project Ideas page for a list of ideas we’ve come up with.
Once you pick a project, make sure you understand what the work entails so that you can plan the work out ahead of time and submit a strong application. The mentors are here to help you. We expect you to have a lot of questions and we’re happy to answer them.
You’ll now need to write a draft proposal for the idea you’ve chosen to work on. You’ll need to use our Project Proposal Template for this.
We expect you to do a significant amount of work on creating your proposal. You’ll need to demonstrate that you understand exactly how to make the changes you’re proposing to the codebase and that you can split the project into smaller deliverables that keep you on track.
This is not something you should be working on in isolation. We expect you to have a lot of questions for the mentors along the way as you try and understand the project, come up with ideas, evaluate feasibility, etc. Please ask these in Matrix or the mailing list. Do not contact mentors individually.
We suggest reading some articles on writing good Google Summer of Code proposals. Here are some examples:
Do not wait until the last minute to work on your application. You should ideally get at least two rounds of feedback from the mentors before you submit your final application and each round of feedback could take a week or so.
Once you’ve received feedback from mentors and made changes to your proposal, you may want to re-submit it for another round of review. You can do that via the same form: https://forms.gle/rZ5eYHwcKdbw2X4H6
Once you’ve received feedback from your mentors and you’re happy with your proposal, submit your final proposal via the Google Summer of Code website.
Here are a few things we consider when selecting which applications to accept:
Please note that we will not be able to select a mentee for every project idea that we have listed. Our organization will be allocated a limited number of project slots by GSoC and we can only accept the number of mentees that we have slots for.