GSoC - Chance for non-developers to get involved

[Urs Liska]

Hi all,

as you may have read we are preparing our Google Summer of Code 
application for the 2018 season. As LilyPond we hope to participate 
under the GNU umbrella, and as Frescobaldi we apply for a second year as 
our own organization.

We have invented a new role for this year: the "Community Mentor", and 
for that role we are looking for a number of users who volunteer to 
potentially take over that role for a project over the summer. I think 
this is a great way for non-developers to get involved with LilyPond 
development and help us grow our base of involved people.

The role is described on http://lilypond.org/google-summer-of-code.html 
and and https://github.com/wbsoft/frescobaldi/wiki/GSoC-Guidelines. But 
essentially a Community Mentor has two different responsibilities:

a)
They have to discuss the planned features with both the student/mentor 
and the wider community. They are explicitly encouraged to take the 
perspective of *users* here, not developers. So this is a unique chance 
to influence the development of some features.

b)
They should be "watchdogs" and "catalysts" for communication. This is 
one area where our GSoC projects have had its weaknesses in the past. 
The Community Mentor should keep an eye on the communication between 
student and mentor being active, and they should proactively encourage 
and trigger communication between the two working on the project and the 
community. I really hope that through this we can make the GSoC projects 
an active and integrated part of oru community life.

Please look through the project suggestions on 
http://lilypond.org/google-summer-of-code.html and 
https://github.com/wbsoft/frescobaldi/wiki/Google-Summer-of-Code to see 
if there are projects that attract your interest. It is not an issue to 
register for a number of projects, as in the end noone will have to 
mentor more than one actual project.

Best
Urs