Opportunity Open Source Conference 4.0 in the IIIT Allahabad

From Contributor to Mentor: What GSoC Really Looks Like (Across Two Different Orgs)

Aug 29, 2026, 3:55 PM

20m

Room 2

Talk (20 min) Community

Speakers

Akash Singh

Sabi

Varsha U N

Description

Google Summer of Code looks completely different depending on which side of the application you're on and it looks different again depending on which org you land in. Between the two of us, we've been GSoC contributors and mentors across two different open-source organizations, giving us a rare combined view: what actually gets a proposal accepted, what breaks contributors in their first few weeks, and what makes some contributors stay in the community long after the program ends.

In this talk we compare notes across our two orgs and pull apart what's universal about GSoC success versus what's org-specific. We'll cover how to pick a project and org that actually fits you, what separates a proposal that gets read from one that gets skipped, the "first PR" wall almost every contributor hits, communication habits that build trust with maintainers fast, and the part most GSoC talks skip on how to stay involved and eventually become a mentor yourself.

Attendees, especially students planning to apply to GSoC, will leave with a concrete checklist they can use for their own proposal, and a realistic picture of what mentors are actually looking for.

Any other info we should know?

Schedule on Aug 29.

Session author's bio

Varsha U N is a third-year Artificial Intelligence & Data Science student and AI Student Researcher with the Dubai Computer Science Society. She is an active open-source contributor and mentor, having served as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2025 contributor with AboutCode before returning as a GSoC 2026 mentor. Varsha is also a 1× National Level Hackathon winner and an organizer for Cloud Native Mysore. Outside of her academic and open-source work, she enjoys writing technical blogs, building CLI tools, and playing badminton. Driven by a passion for collaboration and technology accessibility.

---

Akash Singh leads DevOps, infrastructure and MLOps at Sabi. He previously served as a DevOps Engineer at FinalRoundAI, Aspora and Embeddings Co., specialising in AWS, Terraform and Infrastructure as Code, and as a Backend Engineer at CloudSek, where his work centred on Golang and microservices. A Kubestronaut holding all five CNCF Kubernetes certifications, he is a Google Summer of Code 2024 and Linux Foundation Mentorship 2025 alumnus.

Akash founded the Point Blank open source community and organises the Cloud and DevOps devroom at IndiaFOSS. He is an international speaker and trainer on cloud native technologies.

Presentation materials

From_Contributor_to_Mentor_OOSC_4.0.pdf