Sponsoring Students Contributing program

We are establishing an architecture for schools, corporations, and other organizations with an interest in open source software education to sponsor students to work under the mentoring and guidance of the Fedora Project teams.

Fedora Students Contributing is about connecting sponsors (those with resources to share) with students (those with time, passion, and skills to share.)

Why you should be a sponsor?
What do you get out of it?


 * Positively impact FOSS projects.
 * Get your brand in front of smart students who want to work on FOSS.
 * Potentially end up hiring great developers through the program.
 * Work on a community program that demonstrates how open source business is done.
 * See something you’d like coded be completed.
 * Other positive brand associations.

What you need to do
We need to start talking, soon.


 * Open by default on the discuss list - http://lists.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/summer-coding-discuss
 * Private via direct email to project leadership - Karsten Wade, ...

What are the resources you can supply?


 * 1) Money to pay stipends to students for spending focused time on these FOSS projects. This is a cross between a summer job and an internship.
 * 2) Someone to help coordinate and to contribute as part of the Fedora Summer Coding special interest group (SIG).
 * 3) Mentors, especially if they work actively in sub-project or area the sponsor is supporting.

What does the Students Contributing program do?
The Fedora Students Contributing mentors sort the student ideas, generate the list of approved proposals, work with the students throughout the summer, and make sure you hear back about how things went.

It’s not necessary as a sponsor to have ideas of how your resources should be used, that’s what the Fedora Project and JBoss.org mentors and sub-projects are prepared to do.

You can learn more about the model we are using in this blog post, Summer Of Code Swimchart: Now With More Generic.