First let me say Hi to Ananya and Karnavee who just came in (I'm guessing names, please correct me if I'm wrong, or if you just want to go by a different name entirely). Thank you for writing! We really appreciate your interest in Google Season of Docs and in Mailman.

Now, I've some more generic stuff to say, not just for Ananya and Karnavee, so, if you're interested in GSoD, read on!

Season of Docs is a new program for us (as well as for Google), and the developers are mostly at PyCon this week, so please forgive us for being a bit distracted and "underinformed". We will be sprinting on Mailman next week, and I'll be giving a lot of attention to the projects page (which is still very thin -- I'm surprised we got in, to be honest! But from now on, OK, we'll be very very good at it!) I expect other Mailman developers will jump in now and then too. (BTW, we're in Cleveland, which is UTC-0400. Plan IRC time accordingly.)

In the meantime, feel free to propose something *now* (there's one proposal up already), or feel free to take your time (there's plenty of time on the timeline). I don't know Google's budget, but my advice is don't think of this as a competition. I can't recall ever being constrained by Google or lack of mentors -- we've been able to accept all the projects we wanted to accept.

You should also ask questions on the Mailman-Developers list and on the #mailman channel on IRC (note -- you need to have an authenticated handle to join that channel). It's generally not a good idea to go on mailman-users@mailman3.org *yet* (your request for ideas will be too vague), and it's a *bad* idea to go on mailman-users@python.org (that's supposed to be about Python 2; discussion there about Python 3 is fundamentally off-topic). Checking out the archives to see what topics come up a lot (obvious candidates for better docs!) is a good idea. Obviously, prioritize mailman-users@mailman3.org (and this time the obvious answer is correct ;-).

Important point: mentoring starts *now*, not when you're accepted. We'll help you improve your proposal. We'll help you formulate posts to the mailing lists when you're asking for feedback from the users. We'll help you understand existing documentation, user interfaces, and code as needed. If you want to work "hands on", we'll help you get set up. If you'd rather play with systems that others maintain, we'll provide test lists and sites for you. (OK, I'm going a little far on that last, I can promise access to *some* test list, and ordinary user access to *some* site, but getting full admin access is going to require resources I don't own. Feel free to ask, and tell 'em I sent you, though.)

In a phrase -- we'll get back to you shortly.

Steve

KARNAVEE KAMDAR writes:

Greetings to the Mailman Community!

I - Karnavee Kamdar - am a final year student pursuing my Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering from Gujarat Technological University, Gujarat, India. I am writing this email to express my excitement and interest in working on the Mailman documentation for Google Season of Docs 2019.