Summer of Code/2010/Organization Application

Overview

Sugar Labs needs to put its application together. We welcome all contributions! I've used the 2009 material as a starting point.

Likely Questions

Sourced from the GSoC FAQ:

Describe your organization.
Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating?
Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
What license(s) does your project use?
What is the URL for your ideas page?
What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
Who will be your backup organization administrator?
What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

Answer Template

Please cite your answer using a definition list. This will make things easier when multiple suggestions for an question appear.

 ;Author
 :Here is my answer to that silly question.

This renders as:

Author: Here is my answer to that silly question.

Answers

Describe your organization.

2009: Sugar Labs is the community organization behind the Sugar Learning Platform, a free and open-source software project. Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education. Originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook and designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers a hardware and distro independent alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software. Sugar Activities running on the Sugar Learning Platform promote collaborative learning and critical thinking, and are used every school day in 25 languages by almost 1,000,000 children in more than 40 countries.; 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.

2010 (Walter): Sugar Labs is the community organization behind the Sugar Learning Platform. Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education. Originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook and designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar is Free Software that offers a hardware- and distro-independent alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software. Sugar Activities running on the Sugar Learning Platform promote collaborative learning and critical thinking. Sugar is used every school day in 25+ languages by almost 2,000,000 children in more than 40 countries. Sugar Labs is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Its volunteers are passionate about learning and the opportunities that Free Software can bring to education.

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating?

2009: Sugar is a community project. We hope to grow our community of developers through our participation in GSoC. In particular, we see GSoC as a good opportunity to tap into the interest we've had from university students who want to get involved with the project and see summer as a good chance to dedicate themselves full-time to doing something substantial with the community. The GSoC program also provides us with a useful impetus to examine our support structures and tools for new contributors, making us more able to welcome new open-source contributors to our project in the future.; Also note that, unlike many open source projects, the "itch" that Sugar scratches is a social need, not an individual need of its developers. This means that explicit community-building programs like GSoC are especially important, as most developers will not become familiar with the software and comfortable contributing through day-to-day use.; We also expect to get some tangible code from the student projects that will have a positive impact on our current and future deployments, including the pilots we'll be starting near students participating in GSoC this summer.

I think this is fine to reuse. --Walter 22:49, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

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

2009: As mentioned in the previous question Sugar Labs only officially became a member project of the SFC in June 2008 and all previous Sugar projects were completed under the OLPC banner.

2010 (Walter): We participated in GSoC in 2009. We had a team of 5 students who worked both one-on-one with their mentors and engaged in overall Sugar development community. Wwe were new to the program and a relatively unknown project at the time; nonetheless, we attracted some outstanding students, most of whom have stayed involved with the project.

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

What license(s) does your project use?

Tim McNamara: Primarily GPL v2. Authors of sub-projects, which we call Activities, are entitled to develop in their own licence terms. Only Activities with open sourced licences are included as part of the Sugar Learning Platform.

What is the URL for your ideas page?

2010 (Tim McNamara): http://idea.sugarlabs.org/

2009: http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Development_Team/Project_Ideas

What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

2009: Sugar devel <sugar-devel@lists.sugarlabs.org>; We also have a non-technical list at:; It's An Education Project <iaep@lists.sugarlabs.org>; GSOC students are encouraged to consider also subscribing to this list to better understand and discuss the educational issues surrounding Sugar.

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

2009: #sugar on irc.freenode.net

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

2009: Summer_of_Code/Student_application_template

Who will be your backup organization administrator?

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

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

2009: Our mentors have a history of being deeply involved and invested with the project and in constant and reliable contact with the community, so we think it is unlikely that this will happen. We also plan to pair mentors to ensure that there is an experienced "second" associated with each project. If a mentor misses the weekly check-in meetings on IRC, their "backup" will track them down as they temporarily cover for them. Finally, our IRC channel is active 24/7, and we will give all students a list of IRC handles whom they can consult specifically. There is a safety net for any software developer who needs it.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

2009: Many of our potential pool of students are already involved in the project, volunteering in a variety of roles, including support, documentation, etc. GSoC presents an opportunity for them to dedicate themselves full time for three months. Also relevant are the steps in the application (getting comments, providing a screenshot) and the Sugar pilot mentioned below.

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

2009: The best we can do is infect the students with enthusiasm for our project's goals. We will launch a Sugar pilot near each accepted project so that students can see immediate results and feedback from children and teachers using their work, thus investing them further in longer-term sustainability and getting their local communities involved as well.