Hello!It is time to apply for becoming a mentoring organization for Google's Summer of Code 2008. I've taken the liberty of re-using last year's application heavily and adjusted them to this year. Attached is my draft for how to respond to the questions.
I'm open for feedback on both content and how it is phrased etc. Don't hold on to your comments very long though, since I hope to submit this in a few days.
-- Daniel Stenberg -- http://www.rockbox.org/ -- http://daniel.haxx.se/
About Your Organization ======================= 1. What is your Organization's Name? Rockbox 2. What is your Organization's Homepage? www.rockbox.org 3. Describe your organization. The Rockbox project started in december 2001 and in it we develop a complete portable music player firmware replacement - including operating system, GUI and application suite. Rockbox runs on a wide range of support platforms including players from Archos, Apple (ipod), iriver, iAudio, Toshiba and SanDisk. We're 100% spare time contributors. 4. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating? We hope to gain interest from new developers, both in the software but also in the community, while simultaneously getting good code and interesting contributions to the project. 5. Did your organization participate in previous GSoC years? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects. (optional) We took part of the program last year (2007) in which we got four projects accepted. Over all I think gsoc2007 gave us a real boost and we learned a lot about the progress and how to act as mentors etc to bring with us for this year. Out of the four projects, one failed. We hope that the experience we got will make all projects we get this year succeed! 6. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (optional) n/a 7. What license does your project use? GPL 8. URL for your ideas page http://www.rockbox.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/SummerOfCode2008 9. What is the main development mailing list for your organization? rockbox-dev@cool.haxx.se, subscription info here: http://cool.haxx.se/mailman/listinfo/rockbox-dev 10. Where is the main IRC channel for your organization? #rockbox on irc.freenode.net 11. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. (optional) no 12. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please enter their Google Account address. We will email them to confirm, your organization will not become active until they respond. (optional) Linus? About Your Mentors ================== 1. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible. All full committers who volunteer are eligible to act as mentors - final choices will be made after we have a list of student applicants, so that we can choose mentors suited to the specific areas of the projects that are actually being accepted. The volunteering mentors all have many years experience of both the Rockbox project as well as indepth knowledge of the source code and general concepts. 2. Who will your mentors be? Please enter their Google Account address separated by commas. If your organization is accepted we will email each mentor to invite them to take part. (optional) not known yet About The Program ================= 1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? We will be requesting that all students communicate with their mentor or the project community at least once a week, to ensure that any disappearances or falling behind gets noticed promptly. We will invite and encourage the students to join and participate in the community, in the mailing lists, IRC and forums so that they feel a part of Rockbox and not something happening on the outside. To reduce the risk of them disappearing. 2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? All mentors are full committers, who have maintained a long term association with the project. Outright disappearance is therefore vanishingly unlikely. In case of mentors experiencing unexpected time pressure, the committer community provides a large enough pool of potential volunteers that we should be able to arrange cover. We have a large pool of active and skilled project members that should be able to cover temporary "outages" of single individual mentors. 3. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? We'll inform the possible students that interaction with the project's community will be considered a plus when selecting applications. During the six weeks familiarization period, mentors will suggest and encourage students to engage in design discussion about their chosen task. Throughout the coding period, mentors will encourage students to make their in-development code available for comment and review on a regular basis. Everything in the Rockbox project happens online, in public forums etc so and we will of course assume and insist that program participants join in and follow this set tradition. By mentoring the students into this world and style of acting, we hope that they will see and understand the upside of doing it this way and that they will then continue doing so even after the project's completion. 4. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes? We have a set of mentors who act professionally and assist as good as we can to help the students see the fun in open source hacking our way. We truly believe that once they've got their feet wet and got the hang of some of the internals, they too will see the light and will hang around even after this summer.
