SoC Application 2008
Q: What should a mentoring organization application look like?
A: In addition to anything else your organization would like to submit as an application, Google will be asking (at least) the following questions as part of the application process:
1) Describe your organization.
- The Enlightenment Project is an open source project dedicated to providing advanced graphical libraries, tools, and environments. Currently, the project is made up of three different components: Enlightenment DR16, Enlightenment DR17, and the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. While we are best known for the Enlightenment Window Manager itself, there is a long history of providing advanced libraries and tools to support the window manager and other applications, such as Imlib, Imlib2, and FnLib, which extend far beyond the window manager itself in scope. Presently, in development towards the DR17 Desktop Shell, we have created an entirely new set of libraries and tools that provide more power and flexibility than any other group of graphical libraries available: the Enlightenment Foundation Libraries. These libraries offer such functionality as an X11 canvas library (Evas), X11 abstraction layer (Ecore), and an canvas based interface layout library (Edje) that allows separation of interface and application logic (thus making every application that uses it "skinable"). These libraries are extremely fast and lightweight. So much so they have been adopted by many other organizations. Most notably, organizations such as Openmoko, Maemo, Terrasoft, the Canola project, and more.
2) Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?
- The Google Summer of Code is one of the best open source events of the year. It provides students with engaging work for the summer, offers organizations the ability to recruit new blood, and pushes new source code into the wild. It is for those very reasons we wish to participate. We feel we have some project ideas that will be intriguing and challenging to a wide variety of students. While offering a student the opportunity to expand his/her horizons might be reward enough, the prospect of fresh contributors to a project is always a "Good Thing" (TM) as well. New contributors always bring new ideas and talents to a project offering the possibility of taking the project to new levels. If a Student is especially interested in Graphics, GUI design, Rendering pipelines and scaling down to Embedded space and up to high-end desktops, then We have a lot to offer as we generally tend to be on the bleeding edge of these things.
3) Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
- We have not participated in previous GSoCs.
4) If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
5) Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.
6) What license(s) does your project use?
7) What is the URL for your ideas page?
8) What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?
9) What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
- Our main development channel is #edevelop at irc.freenode.net, but we also provide #e for broader discussion, also with non-developers participants.
10) Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
11) Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.
12) Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.
- Carsten (raster) Haitzler
- Michael (KainX) Jennings
- Nathan (RbdPngn) Ingersoll
- dan (dj2) sinclair
- Vincent (caro) Torri
- Christopher (devilhorns) Michael
- Eric (ravenlock) Schuele
- Gustavo (k-s) Sverzut Barbieri
- Cedric Bail
- Caio Marcelo de Oliveira Filho
- Ulisses (Ryback_) Furquim
13) What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
- Mentors must be well-known, long-term members of our community
- Have a proven history of "Good Code" in our CVS
- Must either be a managing developer for the area mentoring in, or be in good standing with the managing developer.
- As it stands, all of the above mentors are well respected, and recognized by our community as experts in their various field of interest in the project.
14) What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
- Contact their peers or supervisor(s) if possible to find where they went to.
- Ensure their code and work is continually put in a public place.
- In the event of complete loss take their work and archive for future possibilities of picking it up again.
15) What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
- Each mentor presently has a backup mentor. Additionally, though they could not commit to providing their time through the duration of the event, we have a large community of whom many are mentor-capable and willing.
16) What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
- Making the SoC event a positive experience for our students is one of our highest priorities. During our selection process the students will have a chance to meet their prospective mentors. After acceptance, we plan to announce our new students arrival on our mailing lists, as well as having an IRC "Ice Breaker" to meet the the rest of the community. Our intention is to keep them actively engaged in the community through:
- regular progress reports on their projects to the mailing lists
- community discussion and design over the mailing lists
- community testing and feedback on their code over both mailing lists and IRC.
- In addition to this the best thing we can do is make sure we are readily available for their mentoring needs, and publicly provide generous amounts of positive feedback on milestones and goals achieved.
17) What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
- We hope that by providing a fun, supportive environment in which students are encouraged and guided toward making productive community contributions, we will foster a sense of pride and fraternity in the students which will last well beyond the conclusion of this program.
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