I am new to GSOC. I have gone through the guidelines and understood everything. I learned that contribution is necessary before sending a proposal to a mentor. The wiki page seems confusing to me. Can anyone guide me how can I contribute to existing issues that is already out there or can I just directly send a proposal stating my approach?
Please, HELP me. I want to get selected.
Which project you are interested in and matches your interest/skill/capabilities?
I am interested in ‘Nominatim - Improve import performance’ in searching domain**.**
I think this project matches my interest. What is next?
We also require for all projects that you familiarize yourself with the software you want to work on. By the time you hand in your project proposal, you should have set up a working development environment and started to make a few simple changes to things that bother you. This part is not optional!
so I would head to Nominatim project page, find something to improve (say, simplest possible thing on the issue tracker - if you encounter another problem not yet reported on the issue tracker that is in scope of Nominatim and you want to fix it - then create a new issue)
or at least play around with the project, set up development environment, import small area
maybe you can contribute improvement to a setup documentation and help other newbies?
disclaimer: you should follow rules of the specific project, in this case of Nominatim. If all your contribution would be copy-pasting into and from LLM tool such as ChatGPT or running Claude Code then it is almost certainly not productive.
You may already have done this, but if it was me I’d deploy it locally and feed it a small piece of local data and see what it can do.
Ok so basically I need to contribute to something right before the application window opens. Is it ok if I start by today itself?