GSoC Regional Groups

This is the time of new students in GSoC. There have been some interests and discussions around GSoC regional groups in the GSoC mailing list.

The regional groups serve a purpose. They discuss country-specific issues, such as issue/delays in receiving the packages in certain countries, taxation in India, local meetups in different countries or regions, or discussions in your local languages (for example, discussions in Chinese in wechat China group).Many countries have their own group. If your country had little to no participation in the past, there is a possibility to have groups covering a larger regions. For example, the group for Africa: https://groups.google.com/d/forum/gsoc-africa

You will need to do a Google search to find your local groups.

I understand some emails may be uninteresting for the audience. But pls avoid sending an email saying "can we pls stop this discussion? It is annoying to me" First you are contributing to the noise by such an email. Second, usually it comes across rude. So avoid sending them unless you are one of the moderators.

A worse case I noticed was an email I noticed asking to stop the discussions on what IM to use. The sender decided to create a separate email thread to express his point. Usually the emails are organized nicely into threads. Avoid creating new threads to express your opinion. Use the same thread. That will avoid too much distraction. If someone is not interested in that particular topic, they may ignore or mute the topic.

Feel free to join or ignore any country or regional GSoC groups. They were typically created by past-students like us. You are not obliged to join them, though they are usually very welcoming to their local students (and are more tolerant to noise).

If you are from Sri Lanka, feel free to join the Google Sri Lanka Google group. It seems to be very passive in recent years though. 

I believe there is a separate Google group managed by GSoC admins to announce the meetups formally to the GSoC admins and others - google-soc-meetups@googlegroups.com I did not see much activity in that group.

Good luck with your GSoC and related meetups.