Hi all,
I'm a SoC veteran (and now working for Google), and I heard you wanted a few more details. The links Oliver pasted are good references, especially the advice to mentors on the wiki. Basically, if selected, mentors of an org are expected to:
1) Provide a page somewhere of ideas/things to do.
The wiki page has some good advice on how to scope and frame those ideas to appeal to students. Basically, reformulate your TODO into an ideas list, with difficulty ranging from open source newbie project to open-ended open source guru task.
2) Receive, review and grade applications from students.
If accepted, you will receive an allocation of N students, and you will likely receive more than N applications. The SoC webapp lets you bounce back and forth with the student, get details on their proposals, ask them to be more specific, and most importantly grade them to signal your own preferences.
Your goal here is to grade the applications based on how interesting they are to you (not to Google, or The World(tm), just your project), taking into account the value of the contribution, feasibility, student motivation, and whatever criteria you feel is necessary. Again, the advice for mentors page provides some guidelines derived from the experience of past orgs, and veterans/googlers are around to help if need be.
Once the application and grading windows close, the top rated applicants who accept will be assigned to you. Each student gets assigned one mentor person in the org (a mentor can mentor several people, but if possible one person per student would be ideal).
3) Integrate the students into your community and get them up to speed.
This usually involves pointing them to docs of your project, possibly sorting out administrativia for version control, bug tracking, wiki accounts, etc. Then, you should be available if they have questions (be it project organization, code architecture, a nasty bug they're tracking down...), and occasionally review their progress and give them guidance if they're getting sidetracked/lost.
As for your question on what qualifies a mentor, I'd say simply knowledge of the code base, how the project is organized, and how open source "works" in general. Some of them have never been exposed to the kind of development process that happens outside university/company settings, and are looking for a semi-controlled environment in which to discover how the open source process works and how they fit into it.
The students who apply to SoC want to get involved in open source communities, so as a member of such a community, you qualify to be the Zen master who will show them the ropes
.
4) Provide mid-term and final evaluations for each student in the GSoC webapp.
These are quick questionnaires that ask how things are going (is the student well integrated, is work going according to plan, have you had to rethink their project, ...), and most importantly whether you want to drop them from the SoC. Hopefully this will never happen, but sometimes it's necessary (if the student never shows up, shows bad will in refusing to integrate with the community, turning out to be so clueless they can't boot a computer without asking for help...).
5) Receive $500 per mentored student to do cool stuff with (eg. XMMS2 used these funds to fund a prize for a logo contest, other orgs just gave the $500 to the individual mentor, as a kind of compensation for their time). Each mentor also gets a SoC 2008 tshirt
So, basically, as a mentor org, and as individual mentors, you take on the role of a benevolent overseer, to help students get involved in an awesome open source project. That's the spirit of it, how exactly that gets applied varies somewhat from org to org.
Hope that helps a little.
Now, I take off my Google hat, I'm not speaking for anyone but myself: I think that FreeOrion looks like an awesome project (not least because it reminds me of long gaming hours of my youth), and unusually mature for an open source game (ie. it's not just "lulz we're making WoW only better! We have no code btw" as most FOSS game projects are). As such, I think it would be a good candidate as a mentoring organization in SoC, if you can spare the people to mentor students. I can't guarantee you'd make it in, but I believe you have a chance.
If you want to talk more live, you're welcome to bug me ('danderson') on the #gsoc IRC channel on Freenode. Other folks there can also help you out. I'll try to hang out here a little as well if you prefer the forum medium (Oliver, bug me on IRC if I seem to have gone
)
Cheers,
- Dave
(Edit: unbreak Oliver's name, which I wrote à la française
)
