Google Summer of Code: End of Year Report
This was GenMAPP’s second year participating in GSoC as an umbrella organization for Cytoscape, GenMAPP-CS and WikiPathways. We had double the students and double the fun!
We were very fortunate to have 3 of our 4 students from last year participate as mentors this year. Our broader recruitment of mentors in general and their contributions to our Ideas Page, allowed us to take on 9 students this year. Though we lost one at the very beginning of the Summer, the other 8 were strong applicants. We assigned 2-3 mentors per student (a practice I highly recommend) and commenced with bonding.
By mid-term, we already knew we had some work to do for next year. The evaluations by our students all pointed to the fact that we have a dearth of tutorial and “starter” materials for developers. While I guess we already knew that, the feedback may help to prioritize the work (Google Summer of Documentation, anyone?). Here are some other paraphrased nuggets of wisdom from our students:
- Get involved and interact with the community as early on as possible (e.g., even before applying).
- Communicating is often more important than writing code.
- Provide channels for your GSoC students to communicate with each other.
- Organizations should try to get people together in person, via a retreat, party or any excuse.
On this last point of gathering for some face-to-face time, we serendipitously planned our annual Cytoscape Retreat during the Summer this year. The benefit to our GSoC students and the increased motivation on the projects was spectacular. In other isolated cases, students overlapped geographically with mentors allowing for in person meetings, but the effect of bringing the larger group together and having the students interact was multiplicative.
A final glance at our end-of-term evaluations bolsters our sense of success and pride for our students: 8 out of 8 said they were going to continue working on their projects and with our organization. Yay!
