4Lennie.nl

Hi All,

Google Summer of Code 2009 has ended and it is the most successful year so far, with just over 85% of the students passing their final evaluations. Including all four of the Melange students.

I must say it has been a hell of a ride. Starting at the moment the organizations are asked to fill in the application form up to the point of completing the final evaluation for the students. Melange has made great progress over the last few months and is now fully capable of running the next GSoC.

Of course there are many more challenges ahead that we need to take. One challenge in particular is hosting the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) contest. This contest is designed to get high school students involved in open source and will also help them to earn some cash when doing so. This contest has only run once so far and it ran on the Google Code website. Now due to one of our GSoC students we are close to running it on Melange. Hopefully we can get a demo website up and running shortly ^_^.

Actually I was more closely involved in the process of the GHOP module for Melange then I’ve said so far. I was also mentoring this particular student, who is from India. Meaning there are a lot more barriers to overtake then the initial hello :). We are talking time zones, cultural differences and language barriers.

Next to those difficulties you also have to think about what you want to have done, how you want it done, when you want it done. How can you keep your student motivated? How can you turn someone who is of a shy nature into someone who takes initiative and dares to ask questions however silly they may be? These are just a few of the questions which have popped into my mind during the last few months when working on this project.

All in all the student has passed the final evaluation successfully and I’m now working with him to integrate his code into our repository and ensure that the next GHOP can be run successfully. Lets hope I can be even a better mentor next year.

-Lennie