GSoC 2017 Mentor Organization Application

Please don't use markdown here, we have to paste it into a form. All answers are limited to 1000 chars.

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Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code?

Many of Metasploit's contributors are already established as exploit developers or penetration testers. Encouraging students to get involved will give those folks a great opportunity to share their skills with up-and-comers. We believe Metasploit offers a unique way for students to deepen security knowledge and learn about exploit development.

How will you keep mentors engaged with their students?

All of our mentors are long-time development team members, most with a track record of helping new users and contributors. Like any developer, our mentors have passionate focus on certain parts of the framework and we will strive to match students with the correct mentor. Project admins will regularly check in with the mentor/mentee engagement. We believe this will help us find problems before they become intractable.

How will you help your students stay on schedule to complete their projects?

First, we will ask students to use GitHub's Projects to track progress in real time as they are working. Mentors will help students break up projects into manageable chunks with measurable milestones. This will also help students in the critical skill of dividing large efforts. Additionally, we ask that students and mentors collaborate on a weekly status report describing their progress to the mailing list.

How will you get your students involved in your community during GSoC?

Most communication with students will happen in the same channels that all our contributors use; namely IRC and GitHub. Students will follow the same procedures of code review that all contributors follow. We hope that this will increase interactions with all of the existing contributors as well as users instead of feeling tied only to their mentor, giving them a network of support and hopefull illustrate the advantages of working with other minds.

How will you keep students involved with your community after GSoC?

Based on the success of the project, we will encourage students to apply for committer rights at the conclusion of GSoC, include them in Metasploit roadmap discussions, and invite them to special community events. After the conclusion of GSoC we will facilitate and encourage students to write about their experience on Metasploit's community blog, giving their work greater exposure to the overall security community.