An idea was raised at the January community meeting about farmOS applying as a mentor organization for the Google Summer of Code program. I did a little digging into the timeline and requirements:
Organizations Apply: Open-source organizations apply to Google to be mentoring organizations for GSoC.
Organizations Publish Ideas: Accepted organizations list project ideas.
Students Apply: Students research organizations and their ideas. Then, they write proposals explaining how they’ll approach a specific project.
Which leads us to a possible action item of brainstorming:
Answers to the application questions
A farmOS ideas list
I’m writing this post to get some feedback and see if this is something farmOS would be interested in pursuing. There’s 3 weeks left before the deadline, so now would be a good time to consider. If you have experience with GSoC, would like to get involved, have suggestions for the ideas list, or just want to voice your opinion, please chime in!
So… we actually participated in GSOC 2022! But via the Drupal Association as the GSOC mentoring organization. Myself and @pcambra served as mentors for Yash Goel who worked on integrating reporting and graphing tools with FarmOS. An archive of the project and link to blog post written by Yash is here: Google Summer of Code
Overall I think this is a good program and I would love to see farmOS participate again in the future if there is a good project + student fit. I don’t remember how many hours we and the student were expected to contribute but I do think it was right-sized, not too small, not too large. It definitely required some volunteer time to mentor - we structured this project with weekly calls, started by providing some getting started tips for both Drupal + farmOS development, scoping out the project goals, and of course answering questions and reviewing some code as we progressed through the summer. But there weren’t any surprises here, IMO GSOC has a good structure. Working with DA was great too because both students and mentors had some extra support from someone who had participated in GSOC before.
This project in particular was a good experience for all of us, but it really highlighted how much on-boarding is required to get someone working in Drupal + farmOS… even though we specifically designed this project to mostly be Javascript development interacting with farmOS via JSON API - this could maybe be simplified if JS code was hosted on a separate site, not provided by a custom farmOS module, etc, but still there are many things to learn. Anyways, Yash certianly learned a lot (a win! and I think was able to do some contract work with @pcambra later on) but perhaps we had slightly too-large of goals from the start of the project Another issue we had was that there wasn’t a good set of “fake data” to work with, which would have been particularly useful for validating the types of reports Yash wanted to work on.
A few hot-takes/advice I have for potential future projects:
Unless very well-scoped, it would be a lofty goal to expect significant feature contributions to farmOS Core within the GSOC timeline
Connecting students w/ a producer to tackle specific needs (reporting, integration, etc) is perhaps a better value proposition, very “real-world” example of work. BUT… I would definitely have concerns regarding “maintainability” of the output after the project is complete and want to make sure everyone involved has the same expectations
This type of producer project simply might not be correct for GSOC if it is more use-case/feature specific, rather than general open source contribution
We need more clear farmOS foundation/community/organization ourselves before even applying to be a GSOC organization It would be ideal if a single person was responsible for just this organization side of things - in theory we could host multiple GSOC projects this way! I’m just careful to underestimate how much work the organization is since I don’t have experience with that side of things.
Thanks for posting all these resources @Fosten! And thanks for summarizing the 2022 GSoC project @paul121! I would love to see farmOS participate with GSoC more moving forward. I can’t say that I have the capacity to commit to it myself this year, but if someone else wants to take the lead I’d be happy to support where I can.
What @paul121 said is probably the ideal future in my mind:
I would like to put my efforts into formalizing our farmOS “organization” this year, in hopes that it can support these kinds of things in 2026 and beyond!
Another issue we had was that there wasn’t a good set of “fake data” to work with, which would have been particularly useful for validating the types of reports Yash wanted to work on.