52 | | Our mentors are active developers from the community. Most of the mentors proposed ideas we list [SummerOfCode#Tasks on our ideas page] and are therefore familiar with the topics. We will make sure that the mentor for a specific project will have the necessary knowledge in the particular problem domain. Our organization administrator has served in this job for two years already and also has experience as a previous mentor/co-mentor. |
| 52 | {{{#!div class="compact" |
| 53 | Criteria for mentors is based on the mentor's visible experience in the MacPorts internals. Since Tcl/tk with namespaces will confuse new people, having mentors that know their way around is key to successfully planning our projects and guiding students to completion. |
| 54 | |
| 55 | Rainer was previously a GSoC mentor, and as a MacPorts manager he brings great experience in our base code. Clemens was a GSoC student, and after completion of his project has stayed with us and implemented many new features in the base code. He can also be influential in helping get people setup for editing tcl/tk if they're new to it, since he went through it! Clemens took backup admin when I moved from mentor to admin when Rainer was too busy last year, and we've kept that structure this year. Lawrence is also contributing greatly to our base code, specifically ensuring packages are built with compilers they "support". This is very helpful as some packages still don't build right on clang, or have legacy issues with old Apple GCC. His efforts allow MacPorts to switch out compilers based on their version for a given package. |
| 56 | |
| 57 | All these mentors fill our desire to have people knowledgeable of navigating our base code, which uses tcl/tk namespaces. |
| 58 | }}} |
61 | | A disappearing mentor has not happened to us, but in the event it happens there will always be other people to help out, usually by assigning more than one mentor to a project. If the student cannot reach any of their mentors, they should contact the organization administrator which will have more contact information. The mentors will communicate among each other about progress and problems of the student, so that it would be possible for another mentor to take over. |
| 67 | A disappearing mentor has occurred once, when we also had a disappearing student. When the mentor disappeared, another mentor—who sooner after actually became a MacPorts manager—stepped in to cover. |
| 68 | |
| 69 | We've made it a rule that mentors will communicate among each other about progress and problems of the student, ensuring clean a clean failover to another mentor. This also helps with evaluation judgement and gauging expectations. |
| 70 | |
| 71 | In the event a mentor disappears there will always be other people to help out, usually by assigning more than one mentor to a project. If the student cannot reach any of their mentors, they should contact an organization administrator which will have more contact information, and if somehow that fails the mailing list to send people after myself and the backup admin. |