In addition to our year-round activities in our various laboratories, where hundreds of students come in person or virtually to learn and code, and alongside our large online community, we have been running a busy activity related to Google Summer of Code for 11 months a year since 2010. GSoC, a program from Google’s Open Source office, is a program that supports open-source organizations like us by paying a stipend to new contributors who help us in developing new functionalities and maintaining our code base.
During the years, we’ve been elaborating a specific protocol to select the contributors who hopefully will achieve a GSoC “intern”. Our protocol is called the LG Score, and basically is a Google spreadsheet that senior mentors at the Liquid Galaxy project fill up during the pre-selection process for GSoC.
In this spreadsheet, we annotate in order the names and emails of all the contributors who want to collaborate, usually around a couple thousand every year.
As we have already posted the pre-requirements tasks to be selected, wannabe contributors start to do the tasks, hopefully following the instructions published there.
When those tasks start to come to our mail, or whatever method is explained in the post, the LG Score starts to change. Mentors evaluate the tasks and annotate the results in the sheet, giving the ok to develop the next one, or returning it with comments for modifications. And at this moment, and upon the score received, the contributor's name goes up (or even down) in the ranking.
As important as the code and other tasks we receive, we evaluate (with other ratings) the soft skills shown by contributors. Some questions we rate are:
How is your communication? Suddenly, some, inexistent... polite or not ...
Are you collaborating with the community? Answering questions from fellow contributors in our Discord channel
Are you attending the multiple streamings we develop to train you and create community? We do require that contributors register at the Google Developers Event Platform for the events to get informed of the planned activities, and ping us back they have registered and attended.
Do you ask questions at our Ask Me Anything sessions and general meets?
Do you participate in our coding contests?
and more
So, the LG Score is since the day we publish the pre-requirements posts and first streamings, changing all day long, contributors who do the pre-required tasks and show better soft skills go up in the list.
The LG Score is not public, sorry, as we evaluate things that are not zeros or ones, but more complex tasks and skills.
At the end, the guys who are at the top of the score are the ones who really want to get a GSoC and have worked hard to achieve it. GSoC is a top of the tech world competitive program, and achieving it is a hard job, but also something you will benefit from in the skills learned, experience acquired, and of course, money received.
