As you may have heard, Octave has been accepted into Google Summer of Code, for our first time as an independent organization! Student applications are due March 21, and decisions about accepting students will be made in early April.
To make GSoC a success, we need not only strong student programmers but also committed mentors to supervise the students and work with them to have contributions be useful for Octave. This can be tough to achieve because mentors are unpaid (though Google may send you a nifty T-shirt).
Each project should have a primary mentor and a backup mentor. In my experience, primary mentors should plan to devote 5-10 hours per week to the project, including speaking with the students and reviewing their code. Backup mentors have a smaller time commitment but still should keep up with project progress and be available to step in when the primary mentor is otherwise occupied.