Re: GSoC 2022

Greetings -hackers,

Our beloved Google Summer of Code is back for 2022! They have once again
changed some of how GSoC is going to work for this year, for a variety
of reasons, so please be sure to read this email and posts linked for
the updates if you're interested! In short, this year both medium and
large sized projects can be proposed, with more flexibility on end dates.

Everyone interested in suggesting projects or mentoring should review
the blog post here regarding the changes:

https://opensource.googleblog.com/2021/11/expanding-google-summer-of-code-in-2022.html

Now is the time to work on getting together a set of projects we'd like
to have GSoC students work on over the summer. Similar to last year, we
need to have a good set of projects for students to choose from in
advance of the deadline for mentoring organizations.

HOWEVER, as noted in the blog post above, project length expectations
have changed. Please decide accordingly based on your requirements and
availability! Also, there is going to be only one intermediate
evaluation, similarly to last year.

GSoC timeline: https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/timeline

One other thing to note is that anyone over the age of 18 will be
eligible in 2022 in addition to students, broadening the pool of
potential applicants and changing the terminology of applicants to
"contributors".

The deadline for Mentoring organizations to apply is: February 21. The
list of accepted organization will be published around March 7.

Unsurprisingly, we'll need to have an Ideas page again, so I've gone
ahead and created one (copying last year's):

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GSoC_2022

Google discusses what makes a good "Ideas" list here:

https://google.github.io/gsocguides/mentor/defining-a-project-ideas-list.html

All the entries are marked with '2021' to indicate they were pulled from
last year. If the project from last year is still relevant, please
update it to be '2022' and make sure to update all of the information
(in particular, make sure to list yourself as a mentor and remove the
other mentors, as appropriate). Please also be sure to update the
project's scope to be appropriate for the new guidelines.

New entries are certainly welcome and encouraged, just be sure to note
them as '2022' when you add them. Projects from last year which were
worked on but have significant follow-on work to be completed are
absolutely welcome as well - simply update the description appropriately
and mark it as being for '2022'.

When we get closer to actually submitting our application, I'll clean
out the '2021' entries that didn't get any updates. Also - if there are
any projects that are no longer appropriate (maybe they were completed,
for example and no longer need work), please feel free to remove them.
The page is still work in progress, so it's entirely possible I missed
some updates where a GSoC project was completed independently of GSoC
(and if I removed any that shouldn't have been - feel free to add them
back by copying from the 2021 page).

As a reminder, each idea on the page should be in the format that the
other entries are in and should include:

- Project title/one-line description
- Brief, 2-5 sentence, description of the project
- Description of programming skills needed and estimation of the
difficulty level
- Project size
- List of potential mentors
- Expected Outcomes

As with last year, please consider PostgreSQL to be an "Umbrella"
project and that anything which would be considered "PostgreSQL Family"
per the News/Announce policy [1] is likely to be acceptable as a
PostgreSQL GSoC project.

In other words, if you're a contributor or developer on WAL-G, barman,
pgBackRest, the PostgreSQL website (pgweb), the PgEU/PgUS website code
(pgeu-system), pgAdmin4, pgbouncer, pldebugger, the PG RPMs (pgrpms),
the JDBC driver, the ODBC driver, or any of the many other PG Family
projects, please feel free to add a project for consideration! If we get
quite a few, we can organize the page further based on which project or
maybe what skills are needed or similar.

Let's have another great year of GSoC with PostgreSQL!

Thanks!

Ilaria & Stephen

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/about/policies/news-and-events/