FAQ for Mentors

What kind of projects are you accepting? Are there specific technologies or topics that you prefer?

The OSRE program supports projects in a wide range of open source communities and reproducibility efforts. We have no requirement for the type of technology or aspects of the project being worked on, so long as it is or ultimately will be part of an open source project or community.

For Summer of Reproducibility mentors: The SoR supports projects that focus on developing and using reproducible artifacts. Project ideas for the SoR program should steer students towards producing reproducibility artifacts for use by others and/or using artifacts to validate research results, evaluate/develop teaching tools for classrooms, and extend research insights. See the SoR program page to read more about these objectives. As with all OSRE projects, we do not require that SoR projects use any particular technology or platform. However, we encourage mentors to design projects that leverage public infrastructure and open source platforms (such as Chameleon Cloud and CloudLab) to exploit the availability of shared resources, which can lead to more robust reproducibility artifacts and usage. For example, Chameleon enhances experiment reproducibility by offering shared access to uniform hardware resources and enabling users to configure, deploy, and share experimental environments (with the Trovi service) through cloud-based tools. Additionally, Chameleon’s Jupyter Notebook integration supports the implementation, analysis, and visualization of experiments within a cohesive environment, significantly facilitating the packaging of experiments for repeatability and further research collaboration.

What is the process for becoming a mentor and submitting a project / project idea?

The program organizers invite potential mentors to post their project ideas directly onto the Project Ideas page so that interested student can review them. Project ideas do not have to be pre-screened by the OSRE/SoR organizers in order to be submitted. We will review your submission before uploading and let you know if we have any questions about your project idea or think the description could use any editing/additional information.

To add a project idea, please read the instructions for participating mentors. Mentors should use tags to associate with a particular year and whether it is a University of California affiliated (“UC”) or Summer of Reproducibililty (“Reproductiblity”) project (or both). More tags can be used to associate the project with a particular research area, e.g. AI, machine learning, chip design, storage systems, data science. We also ask all mentors to include their biosketch and headshot on the mentor page.

There is a mentor-only mailing list. Please write us an email if you want to be added to this list.

For new research groups wishing to join OSRE: just create one or more projects (see instructions).

What happens after a mentor submits a project idea and what criteria is used to determine which student projects get support for the summer?

Once we open the project ideas page up for review by potential students, interested students will begin reaching out to mentors with questions about the project and requests for review of their potential OSRE project. The proposal writing process is iterative and the mentor works closely with students as they formulate a proposal for their summer project based on the mentor’s project idea. The primary criteria for which student projects get picked for support is the extent to which the mentor and student appear to be a good fit. Mentors are ultimately responsible for choosing a student project that will be beneficial to their overall work. Other criteria we consider when evaluating projects include 1) whether a student projects will have a significant impact on the relevant open source or reproducibility project and 2) if all timelines and deliverables seem attainable. The importance of building and maintaining a diverse community is also an important goal of the OSRE, thus the inclusion of mentors and applicants from historically excluded groups will also be a consideration when selecting student projects.

Can students who currently work with a mentor be considered for support under the OSRE/SoR?

The OSRE program’s ability to support students work is based on participation in a number of programs – like Google Summer of Code and Summer of Reproducibility. Each of those programs have different rules for those related to whehter current students can be supported with their funding. When OSRE projects are supported through the Google Summer of Code, student must be be new to the communities that they will work with over the summer. Students already working on those projects will therefore generally not be allowed to apply under the OSRE. Note that this is not a restriction for Summer of Reproducibility projects supported under the REPETO project. In those cases, mentors can encourage students they know to apply for SoR student slots. If you have questions on this please contact the OSRE organizers.

How are selected students compensated for their summer work?

Selected students are provided a stipend for the summer. The amount of stipend they receive is based on the number of hours their project is expected to take. For example a full time project is considered to take approximately 350 hours over the course of the summer. A US-based undergraduate student will receive approximately $6000 over the course of the summer for a full time project. Note that the stipend rate for students is based on the location where they will be completing the work. OSRE uses the same rate as those for the Google Summer of Code contributors. Questions about stipends can be addressed to OSRE organizers.