Summer of Code

NOTICE:  This page is a draft in active flux... Please contribute to these contents and discuss issues on the discussion page.

Introduction

The purpose of this project is to get Sugar Labs ready for a Google Summer of Code mentor organization application, and to coordinate a Sugar Labs Summer of Code effort if accepted. (From the 2009 FAQ: "Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects.")

This is a project under DevelopmentTeam. Mchua is the current project coordinator and can be contacted with any questions.

What makes a good project

Our focus is on collaboration and community for the summer 2009 round of projects, though we'll also consider thoughtful proposals that lie outside these two areas and can make a strong case for how they would support the Sugar Labs mission.

Collaboration

This refers to API or activity work that makes collaboration "work better." A good metric for "works better" is to ask the following: "6 months after the summer ends, which projects are likely to have caused the highest increase in children-hours spent collaborating over Sugar Activities?"

Community

This refers to meta-work that makes it easy for Sugar to reach a broader community; this includes development tools (and accompanying implementation of processes and training), internationalization/localization, accessibility, infrastructure-building, and porting Sugar to other platforms.

A good metric for "reaches a broader community" is to ask the following: "6 months after the summer ends, which projects are likely to cause the highest increase in SL community members that have participated consistently on a team for a minimum of 3 months?"

Get involved

Mentors

The preliminary /Mentors' application page is now up.

Students

Student applications open on March 23rd. In the meantime, look at the list of project ideas or propose your own. Bring your proposals to the community, developers, and potential mentors for feedback on the mailing list or IRC.

Supporters

We're currently in the "get ideas" phase; please see DevelopmentTeam/ProjectIdeas for a list of potential projects, and add your own. (There are some more project ideas from a brainstorming session at Sugar Camp that should be ported over; let Mchua know if you'd like to help with this.)

We would welcome help coordinating the overall effort as well; please contact Mchua if you'd like to get involved with this. We are currently working on the /SL application to Google.

Community-building ideas

The mentoring org application includes the following questions:

1. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
2. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

This is a place for brainstorming these issues.

[11:59] <mchua> homunq: we also need a general plan for how we're going to use this as a good community building tool for new developers, though that's a little vague [11:59] <mchua> homunq: stuff like "would a weekly check-in email be a good idea?" "do we require mentor meetings on IRC?" "are students mandated to blog about their work?"