We want to help individuals get their start in Open Source by contributing to a technologically-diverse project that has a welcoming community and that values contributors and the learning process above all else. The Asciidoctor project offers many exciting problems to solve, which appeal to a wide-range of skill sets and specialties. Being an ecosystem, every contribution has a positive impact on many other components and therefore promises a very rewarding and fulfilling experience for the student. Since everyone needs to write, contributors also become users. Asciidoctor is especially salient for students, who will likely become a user of their own work in the context of their education journey. Moreover, they’ll become a lifelong, valued member of the Asciidoctor community.
Asciidoctor has is very well-connected, global community. We communicate daily on the mailinglist, issue tracker and social media. One thing we’ve become very good at is keeping people excited and interested in the technology. We like to say "activity drives progress". This will also be our strategy to keeping mentors engaged with their students. We’ll talk about the project, ask questions, offer feedback and, most important, provide encouragement. This, in turn, keeps efforts afloat and moving forward. When you get one of us, you get all of us. The community as a whole will be as much of a mentor as the individual delegates.
The mentors, as well as the Asciidoctor community at large, will keep the students progressing by providing feedback, testing the work in progress and encouraging and promoting their work. We find the best way to keep projects moving forward is to give those projects an attentive audience. When the student isn’t making progress, we will encourage progress by requesting that they either commit code early and often or file issues to collect feedback about what code to write. We’ll also encourage students to setup a HubPress.io blog to talk about what they are doing. Given that HubPress is also based on Asciidoctor, it makes them users of the very technology they are improving.
If you work on Asciidoctor in any capacity, we embrace you warmly and without condition. Every person that has worked on Asciidoctor has become an integral part of the community. We also recognize every contribution on the Asciidoctor contributors page (http://asciidoctor.org/contributors/). This helps them to feel part of the group from day one.
Communication. As I said before, "activity drives progress". When activity slows down, we assume that progress does as well. We jump start that activity again by engaging with the contributor, in this case the student. Given how many people are involved in the Asciidoctor community, the contributor gets to hear from a lot of different people, which we believe makes it feel less demanding. Instead, it feels more like being part of a team. The community members are teammates and encourage each other to move forward.
I have personally been involved in GSoC in the past under the JBoss organization. I served as both an administrator and a mentor. I helped oversee several very successful projects. Those students are still part of the community of the project to which they contributed (Arquillian) and have even gone on to win awards based on related work.
To get ideas about how to improve the application, see https://wiki.jenkins-ci.org/display/JENKINS/Google+Summer+Of+Code+2016.