To those accepted this year:

[Adam Schreiber <sadam gnome org>]

Dear GNOME-lovers,

Congratulations: you did it! The GNOME community is glad to welcome
you, and to have you participate in the Google Summer of Code and work
on GNOME-related stuff!

Some of you already know the GNOME community quite well, but it might
not be the case for everyone of you. That's not a problem: SoC has a
community bonding time, where you will have a few weeks to get to know
the community before starting the real work. That's a really good
thing, and we hope you'll be able to see how great, friendly and
helpful the GNOME community is!

The first thing we want you to do is to contact your mentor. Write him
a nice mail or buy him a beer (or some juice) if you happen to live in
the same city :-)

If during the SoC, you have a problem with your mentor (lack of
communication, or misunderstandings, or deep disagreements, or
anything else), don't hesitate to report that to the GNOME
administrators (Sandy, Adam and Daniel): they'll be there to help
with this kind of things and their goal is to make sure that you feel
good, so they will work hard to fix any issue with your mentor. But
hopefully, this won't be needed: all mentors and administrators are
nice people (or at least, they're supposed to be ;-)).

After sending a mail to your mentor, you should go subscribe to our
mailing list for the Summer of Code:

 http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-soc-list

Feel free to use this list for discussion between all mentored
students, or to ask questions about GNOME, or about the community or
about anything you need. We'll check next week if you're all
subscribed since this is the list where mails will be sent when we
need to reach all of you. It's also the list that you will use for
your status reports.

To begin things, it would be great that you send to this list an
introduction mail so that the whole community knows about you, your
project, your plans, etc.

Another list that might be of interest to you is the gnome-love mailing list:

 http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-love

That's also a good place to start asking questions if you have
problems with building GNOME, or if you're not sure how to do
something.

There's also an IRC channel for SoC and GNOME: #soc on GIMPNet
(irc.gnome.org). Feel free to join it and chat there. You can also
join #gnome-hackers where most GNOME people are, and other channels
that might be of interest to you. See this page for more information:

 http://live.gnome.org/GnomeIrcChannels

Please let the administrators know what your prefered email address is.
They'll make a note about it somewhere. Also, if you have a blog, we'd
love to know the URL and get a hackergotchi for you :-)

That's all for now. If you have any questions, feel free to send a
mail to the administrators or the mailing lists, or ask your mentor.

Small summary:
 + make sure you're in contact with your mentor(s)
 + subscribe to the gnome-soc-list mailing list
 + introduce yourself to the community
 + (optional) subscribe to the gnome-love mailing list
 + (optional) start using IRC
 + (optional) send your blog information and a hackergotchi to the
   administrators

Welcome and Congratulations!
The GNOME SoC Team