Dear preCICE Community,
tl;dr: we need the help of experienced community members in reviewing an unprecedented amount of community contributions on GitHub.
If you always wanted to actively contribute, but you didn’t know how, this would be an excellent opportunity to start.
A bit more than a week ago, we got accepted for the first time at the Google Summer of Code: “a global, online program focused on bringing new contributors into open source software development. GSoC Contributors work with an open source organization on a 12+ week programming project under the guidance of mentors”. This year, 185 organizations are participating. Other organizations you might know are SU2 and MBDyn, and we are one of the 14 new organizations. If you have advice for us, please drop me a message.
So far so good, and we are looking forward to closely mentoring up to 4 new contributors over summer - we have some project ideas, which include modernizing our website, further developing our system tests, and improving the configuration and configuration-related error messages in the preCICE library.
“Summer in Germany only starts in June”, you may say. We also did not expect such a massive influx of pull requests before the application period even starts. We have added a GSoC label to pull requests and issues contributed in that context, and right now (March 2, 11:00 CET, day 11) we have:
| Repository | Total PRs | Merged | In review | Closed | New issues |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| website | 77 | 28 | 27 | 22 | 23 |
| core library | 19 | 2 | 17 | 0 | 0 |
| tutorials | 11 | 4 | 7 | 0 | 0 |
| micro-manager | 10 | 0 | 9 | 1 | 0 |
| python bindings | 2 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
| Total | 119 | 35 | 61 | 23 | 23 |
There are also already more than 34 GSoC introduction posts in this forum (~10x more than we can absorb), from very motivated people (thank you! 
).
Here is how experienced users can help: We are adding a GSoC label to pull requests and issues created in this context. Find any of these that look interesting to you and add your comments. We will treat this as a preliminary review. Summon the respective repository maintainer when something looks ready from your perspective, to continue the review.
This call is meant mostly for the long-term preCICE users. If you are a GSoC contributor and want to review other GSoC contributions, please only do that if you really know what you are doing.
Let’s see if we can together already unlock the next level of community participation.
Best regards,
the preCICE maintainers