Hi, everybody

It's that time of year again! PSF is in GSoC 2024, I'm 99% certain PSF will accept Mailman as a suborg (don't ask about the 1%, it's embarrassing ;-). Student applications open on March 18. So ...

If you have ideas for improving Mailman 3, whether misfeatures that need fixing or cool new features, please consult our ideas page https://wiki.list.org/DEV/Google%20Summer%20of%20Code%202024 to get an idea of level of detail and style of description needed (and to see if maybe it's already there. You can send them to me if they're already formed in your mind, or send them here for input from users on requirements, or to mailman-developers@python.org for input on implementation feasibility and appropriateness for GSoC.

If you know anybody who would be interested in participating as a contributor, please encourage them to look at us. Rules are somewhat relaxed from years ago. They still don't accept below college age, but they no longer restrict to students. They're also offering multiple period lengths from 8 to 22 weeks (stipends vary according to period and by price level in country of residence, see https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/help/student-stipends). They're not as generous as a few years ago, at least for the "rich" countries (US, UK, Japan).

You don't need to be an experienced coder or project manager to be a secondary mentor, just willing to communicate with the code contributor. If you're interested in being a primary or secondary mentor, the burden is likely to be "as much as you want". We rarely get more than one good application, and we have enough "default" primary mentors to cover the likely maximum number of slots we could be allocated. It would be very helpful to us and to the PSF organization administrators if you express interest and get signed up by the end of next week, but as far as I know we can add or substitute mentors at any time.

Potential mentors should

1. Have a Google account (needed for step 2, and required by GSoC)
2. Sign up with Python-GSoC at https://forms.gle/coJYxhor6FAZcZfU8
3. If you have been a GSoC mentor or org admin in the past, go to https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com and accept the contributor agreement and program rules for 2024. (Definitely if you did last year, probably for 2022 the system still remembers you, and unlikely it has more memory than that.)

Steve