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 2008 FAQ: "Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a 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 2008 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

Mentor and intern applications aren't available at this time; we need to get accepted first! Add this page to your watchlist to get updates.

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.)

We're looking into running a brainstorm on Sugar Labs project ideas, likely in late Feb 2009. The objective of such a brainstorm would be to reach a rough consensus on what kind of working code is most useful to us (in other words, how to prioritize projects). The secondary objective of the brainstorm would be to generate a lot of nifty project ideas. The idea is that consensus on prioritization will make it easier for people to fit their own ideas in. If you can help plan or participate in such a brainstorm, post your ideas here.

We would welcome help coordinating the overall effort as well; please contact Mchua if you'd like to get involved with this.