Why is your group applying to participate? What do you hope to gain by 
participating?

We intend to end the summer with new enthusiastic, experienced, 
top-notch Gentoo developers.


What criteria do you use to select the members of your group? Please be 
as specific as possible.

Administrators must have past mentoring experience, and at least one 
administrator must have past experience as an administrator. 
Project-specific mentors will be selected if they are known as the 
authority on that project in Gentoo. Senior overseeing mentors with 
previous mentoring experience will also be attached to teach project 
mentors.


Has your group participated previously? If so, please summarize your 
involvement and any past successes and failures.

Yes. Gentoo has a positive track record, which has improved over time as 
we've gained experience in mentoring full-time students with part-time 
mentors. Last year was particularly good, with 5 of our 6 students 
succeeding. One of those students recently joined Gentoo as a 
full-fledged developer (Nirbheek Chauhan) [1] and is actively working on 
bringing his project to a full release [2], another remains active in 
the community (Eric Thibodeau) [3] and a third continued work on his 
project through the end of 2008 (Nandeep Mali) [4].

1. http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-project/msg_5b0da6af527ca60441e8e5b3fa3ba5ce.xml
2. http://git.overlays.gentoo.org/gitweb/?p=proj/autotua.git;a=summary
3. http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-cluster/msg_19e7cda0fefac64b7f7cbb91f3d39ccd.xml
4. http://git.tuxfamily.org/beacon/trunk.git


What is the URL to the application template would you like contributors 
to your organization to use.


What is your plan for dealing with disappearing contributors?

Daily attempts to reach them through multiple forms of communication. We 
will require a physical address and phone number, and we will confirm 
the phone number at the start of the program. If we cannot reach them 
successfully via these methods, Gentoo's community is large, so we will 
attempt to have someone near them geographically get in touch. If we 
cannot get in touch for 1 week without any advance notice from the 
student, they will be sent a final warning. If we hear nothing by the 
following day, they will be failed. Students will be informed of this 
policy when the program starts and will agree to follow it.


What is your plan for dealing with disappearing members?

We have available backup mentors so that students will never be without 
mentorship, even if the original mentor disappears. We will pursue the 
same communication methods as with students, and failures will be dealt 
with by blocking them from any future mentoring.


What steps will you take to encourage contributors to interact with your 
community before, during, and after the program?

We will strongly encourage applicants to interact with the community 
using our standard communication methods (mailing lists and IRC) before 
and during the application & evaluation periods. If they cannot learn to 
do it during that month-long period, we can't expect that they will 
learn to do so during the next few months. That will count against them 
in the ranking of their application. Since communication will be one of 
the requirements for a successful application, we expect that problems 
during and after the program will be much rarer.

We will treat students in the same way we treat other new members of our 
community, a significant portion of whom are college students just like 
the applicants. By encouraging students to communicate directly with the 
community instead of privately with their mentors, we will infuse them 
with the process of open-source development.


What will you do to ensure that your accepted contributors stick with 
the project after the program concludes?

In the past, we've discovered that a major key to sticky contributors is 
close personal ties with the community. Requiring students to become 
full members of the development community will naturally result in a 
higher stickiness. Another technique that we discussed at last year's 
mentor summit was trying to transition students into developers before 
the summer ends, to create a natural continuation instead of a break.