For potential mentors: students work remotely and will typically communicate with you electronically. Students are expected to be self-motivated and responsible for getting work done. Your average time investment is about one-four hours per week.
When a student contacts you, please tell the student a bit about your project. Here’s some questions you might want to answer:
Include any instructions or information about communicating, e.g. your time zone.
The following information comes from the GSoC manual on what makes a good GSoC project. There are many ways to define a good GSoC project—probably as many ways as there are student-mentor pairings. Here are just a few:
Low-hanging fruit: These projects require minimal familiarity with the codebase and basic technical knowledge. They are relatively short, with clear goals.
Risky/Exploratory: These projects push the scope boundaries of your development effort. They might require expertise in an area not covered by your current development team. They might take advantage of a new technology. There is a reasonable chance that the project might be less successful, but the potential rewards make it worth the attempt.
Fun/Peripheral: These projects might not be related to the current core development focus, but create new innovations and new perspective for your project.
Core development: These projects derive from the ongoing work from the core of your development team. The list of features and bugs is never-ending, and help is always welcome.
Infrastructure/Automation: These projects are the code that your organization uses to get its development work done; for example, projects that improve the automation of releases, regression tests and automated builds. This is a category in which a GSoC student can be really helpful, doing work that the development team has been putting off while they focus on core development. source: GSoC manual
Prospective students are interested in “new” technologies and languages, such as iOS and Android apps, and fancy, flashy, web-based projects.