Motivation
In this study, we want to understand the motivations, challenges, strategies, and gains of GSoC mentors, aiming to assist the better development of the GSoC community.
Method
We conduct a qualitative study with GSoC mentors, mainly containing two steps.
considering the related studies and GSoC official documents, we designed a questionnaire containing five parts: motivations, challenges, strategies, gains, and project demographics. We send this questionnaire to the GSoC mentors whose email addresses can be obtained. We collected the emails of mentors through the following steps:
We used the GSOC office website (https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/organizations/) as the index.
Through this website, we can obtain the names of students and mentors participating in each organization.
By clicking "view code submission", we can see the final reports of students. Some students provided the information of their mentors in their final reports, e.g., the hyperlinks of mentors' GitHub. Some mentors publish their personal email addresses on the homepages.
If we still can't obtain mentors' emails, we used the GitHub search engine to search "mentor's name" within the organization. In this way, we may get the email information of the mentors.
In addition, we even check the commit messages of the mentors because some organizations ask developers to use the "signed-of-by" tag in the messages.
In order to supplement and enrich the above findings, we plan to interview several mentors.
Data management
All information collected is strictly confidential, and the researchers on this project are the only ones who will have access to this data. Our research is independent from Google. No information collected on the identity of participants will be made available for individuals outside of this research project.
Reference
[1] Silva J O, Wiese I, German D M, et al. Google summer of code: Student motivations and contributions[J]. Journal of Systems and Software, 2020, 162: 110487.
[2] Silva J, Wiese I, German D M, et al. A theory of the engagement in open source projects via summer of code programs[C]//Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. 2020: 421-431.
[3] Silva J D O, Wiese I S, German D M, et al. How long and how much: What to expect from Summer of Code participants?[C]//2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). IEEE, 2017: 69-79.