[Ns-developers] request for GSOC mentors

[Mathieu Lacage]

I wanted to add a couple of FAQ entries about this:

1) What is a mentor supposed to do ?

A mentor is supposed to do daily management and mentoring of a student.
This means, helping with technical and planning problems. For ns-3,
mentors are expected to provide expertise in the field which is directly
related to the student's project. Expertise in core ns-3 development is
not required since the ns-developers mailing-list is there to helper
answer potentially problematic questions and problems but familiarity
with ns-3 concepts would probably be necessary.

2) How is a mentor supposed to manage a student ?

Students are expected to work from home: students from all over the
world apply for gsoc so, you can't expect them to move over to where you
live/work for 3 or 4 months. Of course, you, as a mentor, are
responsible for picking the students you are willing to mentor and a
location criterion is perfectly acceptable if there are multiple
qualified students and if you wish to pick one who is located closest to
your timezone, or your geographical area or your city or your office.

3) What is the daily overhead of being a mentor for a student ?

It really depends on the student, the mentor, and the project, of
course, but 1 hour a day is generally considered the minimum realistic
cost of mentoring a student.

4) What do you get from this, as a mentor ?

gsoc will pay to the ns-3 project 500 USD per mentor. Generally, part of
that money is given back to each mentor (only part because there are
some tax issues) but the ns-3 project has still been unable to actually
get the money from google from last year's gsoc I think (tom, please,
correct me if I am wrong). Money is thus unlikely to be a deciding
factor for a mentor. 

What is more motivating is usually that the mentor has vested interest
in seeing a specific feature being developed and integrated so, mentors
usually get a new feature they really want. The ns-3 project, on the
other hand, is focused on convincing new contributors to work on the
project, long term. Success is thus usually defined as seeing a student
and/or mentor stay around after the completion of the gsoc project.

On Tue, 2009-03-10 at 16:59 +0000, Tom Henderson wrote:
> We're seeing a lot of student interest already in the Google Summer of
> Code program, to which we're reapplying this month.  I've also been
> adding lots of ideas for possible student projects to the wiki:
> http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/index.php/Gsoc2009
> 
> However, we really need some more mentors to step forward at this
> time, either to agree to mentor one of the project ideas listed, or to
> contribute other ideas for which you'd be willing to mentor a student.
> We need to understand how many projects, and what types of projects,
> we can mentor.  
> 
> If you have some expertise in some aspect of networking, and
> familiarity with ns-3, please consider volunteering as a mentor, and
> contact Joe Kopena.
> 
> Thanks,
> Tom  
> 
> 
>