Summer of Code/SL application

Applying to Google Summer of Code

How does a mentoring organization apply?

The organization should choose a single administrator to submit its application via the GSoC web app between March 9-13, 2009.

Mel Chua has agreed to be the administrator. Homunq and Walter will help prepare the application.

What should a mentoring organization application look like?

Describe your organization.

Sugar Labs is the community organization behind the Sugar Learning Platform.

Sugar promotes collaborative learning through Sugar Activities that encourage critical thinking, the heart of a quality education. Designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers an alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software.

Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education. Available in 25 languages, Sugar’s Activities are used every school day by almost one-million children in more than forty countries.

Originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook, Sugar runs on most computers. Sugar is free and open-source software.

Sugar Labs, a volunteer, non-profit organization, is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The mission of Sugar Labs is to support the Sugar community of users and developers and establish regional, autonomous “Sugar Labs” around the world to tailor Sugar to local languages and curricula. Sugar Labs volunteers are passionate about providing education to children.

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

no

If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

no

What license(s) does your project use?

Primarily GPLv2+ Some activity developers use other FOSS licenses, such as MIT, LGPL, etc.

What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?

Sugar devel <sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org>

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

irc.freeenode.net #sugar

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

Mel to write?

Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.

Walter Bender <walter.bender -AT- gmail.com>

Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.

1. Walter Bender <walter.bender -AT- gmail>
2. Jameson Quinn <Jameson.Quinn -AT- gmail>
3. Nirav Patel <nrpatel -AT- gmail>
4. Tomeu Vizoso <Tomeu -AT- sugarlabs.org>
5. Bobby P <> nteon on IRC

What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

All of our mentors have experience with the Sugar code base and most of them have been with the project since the beginning, more than 2-years ago. Also, they have been active in our software development support community and a regular presence on our support IRC channel.

We also plan to pair mentors to ensure that there is an experienced "second" associated with each project. Finally, our IRC channel is active 24/7. There is a safety net for any software developer who needs it.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Where as our mentors are so deeply invested in the project, it is unlikely that any will "disappear" over the summer, but regardless, we plan to have secondary and tertiary support for each project as described above.