Officially a DocBook Mentor for Google Summer of Code 2012

I have got the opportunity to be a mentor for DocBook organization under Google Summer of Code 2012. I was a former participant of Google Summer of Code 2010, and 2011. In 2010 I worked with DocBook as a student with my mentor David Cramer where I developed the DocBook WebHelp output format. I always fascinated contributing to an Open-Source project, so it was a big achievement for me. I kept contributing to it which made me a part of the community, and a Committer for the project.

As many of you probably know, Google Summer of Code is an annual program administered by Google, in which Google sponsor students to complete a free and open-source software coding project. This is eighth iteration of GSoC. Most of the giants in Open-Source has been part of it including GNU, Gentoo, Apache, KDE, Ubuntu, Mozilla with student participants from all over the world.

DocBook has secured five slots this time. We had enough resources to mentor five slots, on top of that there were five good proposals to mentor for. Fortunately, there wasn't any issue with de-duplication or from anything for that matter, so all five were selected into DocBook. This time, as usual, Richard, and Stefan Seefeld are the org admins. Stefan Seefeld, David, Jirka, Steve, and me are primary mentors for the five students while Stefan Hinz, and Peter Desjardins will be co-mentors for the two selected webhelp proposals.
Yes, two proposals were for WebHelp. That made this year's program more exciting. The two students were, Visitha, from University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka (my Alma Mater), and Arun, from PES Institute of Technology Bangalore, India. There were overlap between them, so we had to sorted those out first before selecting both.

I found Visitha during the Google Summer of Code meetup at University of Moratwa we, past Sri Lankan gsocers, organized. Buddhi, who also attended that meetup has selected into DocBook. It's so glad to hear that people appreciating the effort we put there, and that it actually meant a lot for most.

I must mention Gihan Chanuka here. He contacted me on last January where he wanted to contribute to DocBook outside of GSoC. He has been asking various questions he had while trying out DocBook. Though he wasn't able to do that, he was a good candidate for GSoC. I am delighted that he also got selected into flying colors. Of course there is a long way to go from selecting to completion, but when it comes to GSoC, selection is a special milestone to pass.

Hoping to have a great time being a mentor this year!