Sorry for the late response, I have been on vacation for the past few days.
There’s Planet GNOME.
As soon as interns are selected, I start sending them instruction emails. In those messages we set the expectation that the intern will blog with some frequency about their progress.
Here’s the week 1 message they received Announcement: GNOME will be mentoring 9 new contributors in Google Summer of Code 2023! - #2
Yes, the soc-admins@gnome.org. I mention at the end of every single message that interns can contact us on that address or directly for any doubts or concerns.
There’s also the GSoC official feedback form that is part of each milestone evaluation. I read all of them and follow up with mentors when there’s an issue, feedback, etc…
They are also incentivized to subscribe to Discourse (although everything that I post here I also send directly to their GSoC email address).
I like this. I have had one intern working with me in GNOME Settings this year and we decided to target all the work to a gsoc-2023 specific branch. https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-control-center/-/commits/gsoc23/new-system-panel
I will suggest this to mentors for the following years, but it is a bit impractical to enforce this.
It is net positive for our community as it brings new people that often continue working with us after GSoC, become foundation members, maintainers, mentors themselves, etc… I would like us to work towards bringing more visibility to that because there are a number of cases like this over the years.
As of now I think the main obstacle we have is with mentor’s time/energy. Folks are busy with their work and personal life and it is difficult to commit to mentoring. I hope our efforts with more org admins can help setup a system of co-mentors that can share the load and make the experience more pleasant for mentors too.