AOSSIE has been participating in Google Summer of Code since 2016 and some of our admins and mentors have been participating since 2011. We are grateful for the support that Google has provided to our organization over all these years. We abide strictly by all the rules of the GSoC program, to uphold the excellence of the program. In addition to the rules, terms and conditions required by Google, AOSSIE also requires all mentors and contributors to abide to the guidelines and rules described below.
To apply for GSoC with AOSSIE, please fill our GSoC Application Form and follow all the instructions there.
Please read this whole file carefully before.
AOSSIE is an umbrella organization for projects hosted under the following GitHub spaces:
Contributions to repos in any of these spaces count for GSoC selection.
Please read our AI Usage Policy carefully and adhere to its principles and rules.
The main selection criteria are:
- Understanding the project beyond what an LLM can tell you is a must. Do not let LLMs define the "how."
- Pull Requests made to projects in any of the above-mentioned GitHub spaces.
- We take into account the quality, quantity and difficulty of the submitted PRs.
- Quality of the PR involves not only quality of the code itself, but also of the PR's scope, the PR's description and PR's readiness.
- Submitting PRs with code that was AI-generated is allowed, but you must be responsible for the code. Use AI responsibly.
- Spamming our repos with untested, broken, AI-generated code will make you ineligible.
- We also take into account whether the submitted PRs demonstrate that you have the skill to do what you are proposing.
- While using AI to generate code is allowed and even encouraged, since it may increase productivity, we are looking for contributors who are more than just "AI pilots".
- We also take into account your behavior during the PR review process, such as your ability to improve your PR based on feedback in our reviews of your PR.
- Pull requests made to any of our projects count, even if the project is not related to your proposal or if the project is not going to participate in GSoC. In fact, we like contributors who contribute to our organization as a whole and not just to a single project.
- We take into account the quality, quantity and difficulty of the submitted PRs.
- Quality of the Proposal
- AI-generated spam proposals will have no chance of acceptance.
- Our GSoC ideas are intentionally a bit vague, so that you need to fill many gaps yourself with the help of mentors during the application phase.
We also take mentoring capacity and project capacity into account. So, if too many candidates apply with proposals related to the same project and that project does not have capacity to have many contributors simultaneously or does not have enough mentors, then we may be unable to select even excellent candidates.
We appreciate perseverance. We have had many cases of candidates who did not get selected in one year, but continued contributing and got selected in another year. We take into account all your PRs, independently of when they were made. Please list them all in your application.
We are looking for long-term maintainers, not just GSoC participants. Your ability to guide and support others matters.
Google allows different project sizes and lengths.
AOSSIE strongly prefers large projects with a duration of 22 weeks.
Larger projects are better, because the administrative overhead is the same independently of the project size, but a larger project size allows more significant contributions. This is better both for AOSSIE and for the contributor, who will have more interesting results to show.
A duration of 22 weeks allows recovery from unexpected challenges (roadblocks in the project itself, personal issues, health issues, communication delays, ...). We strongly encourage that you select 22 weeks as the duration for your project, but plan to complete most of it in the first 12 weeks (during the summer vacation period, when you are likely to have more free time).
AOSSIE is interested in selecting the best contributors according to the criteria above. Favoritism, bias and conflict of interest have no place in our selection process.
Our rules to prevent conflicts of interests are stricter than Google's. In addition to all the rules by Google, AOSSIE's mentors, contributors and candidates must also respect the following rules to be eligible:
- All communications between mentors and candidates must occur through our communication channels. See our Communication Guidelines and Rules for more details. If you are a candidate who had any form of private communication with any mentor, even if not related to GSoC and even if merely coincidental, you must disclose this in your application.
- A contributor who participated in GSoC in a previous year with AOSSIE is not eligible to apply again for GSoC with AOSSIE.
- If you are a mentor with any affiliation or relationship, even if temporary and even if unpaid, with any entity from where there might be candidates applying for GSoC with AOSSIE, you must disclose this relationship to an admin prior to the GSoC application phase.
- Failure to disclose may lead to the ineligibility of candidates from that entity.
- If you are a mentor, you are welcome and encouraged to talk about GSoC and AOSSIE online (e.g. in YouTube videos) or in local events (e.g. hackathons). However, if you do, you must inform the admins. If you are candidate who attended a talk by an AOSSIE mentor, you must disclose this to admins.
- Contributors and mentors from the same university or institution, even if already graduated, are considered to have a potential (even if not actual) conflict of interest. Such potential conflicts of interest must be disclosed to admins.
- Failure to disclose may lead to ineligibility of the candidate.
- For any other types of potential conflict of interest not explicitly listed above, admins should be informed.
- Proposals will only be evaluated by mentors who do not have any potential conflict of interest with the candidates. If there are no mentors capable of evaluating the application without a potential conflict of interest, the application will not be selected.
If you suspect that these rules are being violated, please contact AOSSIE's admins.
If you are a candidate:
- do not pretend to be a mentor.
- do not try to intimidate or harass other candidates.
- do not criticize the contributions of other candidates.
- do not try to persuade other candidates not to apply.
- do not try, by any means, to gain any unfair competitive advantage over other candidates.
We are looking for honest, cooperative contributors. The behaviours described above are incompatible with what we are looking for.
Keep in mind that mentors are volunteering their time and also have other responsibilities. Because of this, there may be delays in answering your questions and reviewing your pull requests. Do not interpret such delays negatively about you or your contributions.
During the coding period, the selected contributors will be required to show weekly progress, by doing all of the following:
- Submit at least one PR per week.
- Break down your project and plan your project's timeline to ensure that you can submit at least one PR per week.
- Small PRs, which are easier to review by your mentors and peers, are a good coding habit in collaborative software development. If you submit a huge PR just before an evaluation deadline, you may fail even if the PR completes the project. It is your responsibility to ensure that your mentor has sufficient time to evaluate whether you completed your project, and the best way to do this is by submitting small PRs weekly.
- Attend our weekly meetings.
- Communicate at least once per week with your mentors through messages in the public discord channel of your project.
- Write a post in Twitter and LinkedIn about your weekly progress.
In order to pass an evaluation, the number of weeks in which you do not do any of these tasks should not be greater than 33% of the weeks preceding your evaluation, unless you have completed your project ahead of schedule.
Furthermore, once during the coding period, you will have to present your project in one of the weekly meetings.
For the final evaluation, in addition to the requirements by Google, AOSSIE requires that you:
- Record a demo video for end-users of your project.
- Record a video explaining what you have done in GSoC.
- Fill an internal feedback form.
Throughout the coding period, keep in mind that mentors are volunteering their time and also have other responsibilities. Because of this, they may not always be able to check in frequently. It is your responsibility to maintain contact with the mentors. The mentors should not have to chase you to find out about your progress. Contributors should take ownership of their work and continue making progress even if the mentor is unavailable for a few days.
If you contribute to AOSSIE in any way (as an admin, mentor, student, contributor), you are not allowed to:
- share tips on how to be selected for GSoC.
- engage with any form of communication (such as, non-exhaustively, podcast, interview, video, article or post) in any kind of medium (such as, non-exhaustively, channel, newsletter, publication, course, mentoring organization, ...) that promises people to help them be accepted at GSoC (such as "crack GSoC" and similar statements), even if your engagement itself does not make such promises.
You may talk about AOSSIE and its projects and, if you are asked or if you want to say something about AOSSIE's selection procedure, you may refer people to https://github.com/AOSSIE-Org/Info/edit/main/GoogleSummerOfCode.md and, more generally, https://github.com/AOSSIE-Org/Info/ . This is where all official information about AOSSIE's selection procedure can be found.
This is a very strict rule. If in doubt about whether some communication of yours might be against this rule, please contact AOSSIE's admins firstly.