I started working towards GSoC 2018 in the first week of February. It was then I decided that I’ll try to be a part of GSoC 2018.
So, the first step in the process is the selection of a project/organization. Instead of selecting the organization I thought to go for a project of my interest, as in case of selecting an organization it is possible that the organization is doing something that interests us but their available projects don’t interest us much. This step is time-consuming and was a little difficult as at that time the organizations for GSoC 2018 were not announced and to choose the projects I had to visit their official websites and their projects wiki/GSoC page.
So after going through a lot of projects, there were 2 projects that caught my eye and I spent almost 3 weeks searching for projects. The first project was Zenodo CLI of Zenodo Organization and the 2nd was Web based certificate and Profile user interface of an organization The Libreswan Project. I read the description and details of both the projects and mailed their respective mentors, whether they are taking part in GSoC 2018 or not and If they are taking part will the Project(mentioned above) be available for GSoC 2018? I got the replies from the mentors within few hours and the mentor of Zenodo told me that their organization is not taking part in GSoC and Paul the mentor from The Libreswan Project told me that the project Web based certificate and Profile user interface is available for GSoC 2018.
During this searching period, I was contributing to the projects of the organizations - The public lab and SciRuby but I didn’t find myself interested in the projects of these organizations so didn’t continue the work there. It was already March and after getting the responses of the mentors of the organizations Zenodo and The Libreswan Project, I decided to go with the project of Libreswan.
Note - Usually the students contribute to multiple projects from different organizations as it increases their chances of getting selected for GSoC.
Next post - GSoC - Initial phase and getting selected