Semester of Code

[Scott Wilson <sc...@gmail.com>]

On a related note, the Semester of Code pilot programme is now open; this is a programme coordinating students from a number of different universities who want to work with FOSS projects.

If you'd like to mentor students working on your Apache project, follow the sign up info below.

-S

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The VALS Semester of Code [1] project is working with European universities and FOSS communities to give students real-world experience working in open source software projects while receiving academic credit. The benefit to your projects will be valuable and hopefully ongoing contributions. VALS will also benefit the wider sector by helping to produce graduates with the skills and experience needed to engage with open development.

Our first Semester of Code will involve approximately 75 student placements, starting in September.  We would like to invite your organisation to participate in this pilot by offering mentored placements within your projects.

If you have participated in Google Summer of Code before, you will find our process similar; we will seek placements for student projects, and will use the a system similar to Google's Melange platform to manage placements.  However, VALS differs from Summer of Code in that instead of receiving money for their participation, students will receive academic credit.  For this reason the mentors from your project will need to liaise with the student's academic tutor.  The VALS project will support this process to ensure it runs as smoothly as possible. We also ensure the admin overhead is minimal.

The VALS initiative is a partnership of European universities and SMEs who have been working for several months to plan the pilot of Semester of Code, which will run during the next academic year.  We have now reached the stage where we are signing up FOSS projects who are willing to provide mentors. We have already seen interest from smaller, single-company projects to larger software foundations, and would like to see more.

If you'd be willing to provide one or more mentored projects, we’d love to talk to you about joining Semester of Code.  In return, you’ll get an enthusiastic student providing a valuable contribution to your project.  The VALS team will be on hand throughout the project to answer any questions and help unblock communication issues between mentors, students and academic supervisors.

To join in the Semester of Code or to simply find out more you can email mark.johnson@it.ox.ac.uk, or you can sign up to our mailing list directly by using the web form [1].

More detail about the Semester of Code are available on our FAQ page [2]. If you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask on the mailing list, and one of the VALS team will get back to you!
1: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=VALS-SOC&A=1
2: http://semesterofcode.com/?p=22