Mozilla and GSoC 2020

I'm pleased to announce that Mozilla has been accepted as a mentoring organization in the 2020 Google Summer Of Code, and would like to express our gratitude to everyone on the GSoC team for their continued support.

This is the first year that we've organized Mozilla's application to GSoC on Github. Mozilla community members, please put your ideas in the /proposals/ directory, in some suitably-titled file, so that we can evaluate them and polish them up.

For Mozillians and friends of Mozilla:

As usual this will be an opportunity to coach a smart student through three months of work on an interesting but non-critical-path project that is open to any part of Mozilla, provided:

• the project is primarily a coding project,
• the proposal is well-scoped with clearly defined progress milestones and outcomes, taking roughly 3 months of effort for a capable student, and
• there is a mentor specifically assigned to the project who is available for the duration of GSoC.

You may already have a student in mind for a specific project already; if so, please start that discussion now. The sooner we have well-specified project ideas lined up with potential mentors, the better.

Otherwise please send us your proposals (via pull request) and feel free to bring us any questions you have about GSoC and Mozilla's participation in it. If Mozilla is accepted as a participating organization the student application period will begin March 16th.

With all that in mind, we're now accepting project proposals,via pull request to the /proposals/ directory of this repo.

Are you a student intending to apply to participate in GSoC with Mozilla?

Your first step should be to look over the /proposals/ folder. Not all of those ideas will make the cut; it could be that they are not properly defined, the wrong size, or don't have a mentor, and that makes them less likely to get accepted. We may simply be awarded fewer GSoC slots than we have projects.

We see a lot of questions about what tasks or bugs students can be assigned in the leadup to GSoC, and while we're grateful for the enthuiasm we would like to discourage people from taking that approach. While it would be helpful for us to be able to assess applicants' skills ahead of time and we always want to be open to new contributors' help, we don't want to treat our GSOC projects as a prizes you might win if you volunteer hard enough. Asking people to labor performatively is unfair and exploitative, and that is not how we intend to operate or who we want to be.

With that in mind, while we encourage anyone who is interested to take a look at our code, download and build it - please do, that's why it's there! - we believe that your best approach as a GSoC applicant is to use what you learn there to help you craft an excellent GSOC proposal, rather than trying to rack up "points" in order to be considered.

Are you a student with a great idea for a GSOC project?

You can, of course, also submit your own ideas; a great idea doesn't need to come from Mozilla to be a great GSoC project. For us to accept a proposal as a GSoC project, your proposal must have a mentor, a defined outcome of reasonable scope, and a calendar with meaningful milestones to have a shot at acceptance. You can submit your proposals either as pull requests to this repo, or as applications through the GSoC process itself. Bear in mind that projects that come as a surprise to the proposed mentor are unlikely to be accepted, so you should have had a conversation with the Mozillians whose support you'd like well ahead of time.

That said, there are a lot of moving parts to the Mozilla project, and figuring out who to talk to can be difficult even if you've got an amazing idea. If this is you, please start by opening an issue describing your idea so we can take a look at it. While we can't promise anything, if your idea looks promising we will do our best to connect you to somebody with domain-relevant experience to discuss turning it into a proposal.

How To Write A Good Project Proposal

• Be specific: It's hard to understand the impact of, or the size of, vague proposals.
• Consider size: Participating students have approximately eight weeks to design, code, test and document the proposal. It needs to fill, but not overfill, that time.
• Do your research: Support the idea with well-researched links to issues, bugs, patches, papers or pull requests.
• Only put a name in the mentor slot if you know they are willing to take on the responsibility. If you think the GSoC admins won't know who you are, leave contact details.
• Stay on top of your notifications: we may have questions about your idea that you will need to answer.

Please note

• Participants in any Mozilla project are expected to respect and uphold the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines

• The GSoC FAQ

• In light of the institutional closures resulting from COVID-19, we have consulted with the GSOC Support Team to find out what the "proof of registration" requirement for applicants specifically means. Their response was:

  If you do not have one of the other acceptable forms of Proof of Enrollment (school ID, transcript) you can submit something with a recent date on it with your name and school name somewhere on the form such as:

  • Your most recent semester exam schedule or syllabus
  • Your most recent semester grade sheet
  • The receipt showing you paid for this semester
  • The letter showing your scholarship/financial aid etc covers this semester in early 2020

  And it is fine to markout the grades or the funding or other personal details (we just need to see your name, your school name and the recent date on there). Our team does not review proof of enrollment documents via email. Your documents will be reviewed after March 31 and the team will let you know at that time if your submission was not accepted. You will be able to submit a new proof of enrollment if the first one is not accepted by our team.