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Why does your organization want to participate in Google Code-in 2019?

We would like to get high school students aware of R and interested in R programming. For several years we have declined to participate in GCI, because we felt that the statistical focus of R may be too complex for high school students. However this year we would like to participate by proposing some simple tasks related to fixing issues, docs, failing tests, and open-source best practices (setting up CI, etc).

How has your organization prepared for Google Code-in 2019?

Our organization has prepared by participating in GSOC for 10+ years. The primary admin (Toby Hocking) plans to recruit mentors from the international R community, and has lots of experience proposing and mentoring coding projects himself.

How many mentors have committed to participate?

5

How do you plan to deal with any holidays or vacations mentors may have planned during the contest period?

We plan to (1) make sure mentors know that they need to provide email feedback for their tasks in at least 24 hours, and (2) ask each mentor to indicate times when they plan to be away from email, and (3) ask each mentor to indicate a backup mentor to contact when they are away.

How do you plan to deal with unresponsive mentors?

Unresponsive mentors have been an issue for us with GSOC as well. For example some mentors in R-GSOC'19 failed to provide student evals. Part of the problem may be that there were multiple mentors per project, so it was not clear who was responsible for the eval. To handle this we plan to (1) communicate responsibilities to mentors clearly, and (2) enforce a policy that non-responsive mentors will not be allowed to participate with R project in for future GSOC/GCI programs.