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GNOME Annual Report 2007 - GNOME and Students

Author: Lucas Rocha

In 2007, the GNOME Project participated in two Google programs targeted for university, and new this year, high school students from several parts of world.

Google Summer of Code

The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers university students a chance to be paid ($4500 USD) to work on a mentored development project for three months on various open source and free software projects. One of the major goals of the program is to bring new and young contributors to open source and free software projects. Once again, the GNOME Project was one of the mentoring organizations of this year's GSoC, having participated in the first two editions the last two years.

GNOME received a total of 174 project proposals, the majority based on ideas proposed by the community before the submission period was started. A selection committee, composed of 12 well-known GNOME community members, selected 29 proposals. These committee members were either invited by the GSoC administrators for GNOME or explicitly volunteered to be part of this committee. Of the selected students, 27 were able to successfully achieve their original goals.

In 2007, the students worked on a very diverse and interesting set of projects. Some projects were about the development of new applications for GNOME such as Cheese, a Photobooth-like application; Foie Gras, a WYSIWYG documentation editor; GNOME Voice Control, a voice recognition applet and more. Others were about new features of existing GNOME applications and libraries. The improvements on the desktop lockdown framework, a new geometry manager for GTK+, and the PDF annotations support in Evince are examples of the contributions by GSoC students. Interestingly, some projects' results have already been made available in GNOME 2.20, such as the Deskbar Applet refactoring work made by the Sebastian Pölsterl, who is now co-maintaining the module with Raphael Slinckx, his project mentor.

The students were very positive in the evaluation of their GSoC participation. "I really enjoyed being one of the GNOME's Summer of Code students! Now I know a lot more about the GNOME community and I'll try help it become even better" said Paulo Zanoni, the student who worked on MPX support for Metacity. Approximately ten GSoC students were sponsored by the GNOME User and Developer European Conference (GUADEC) organizers to attend the conference in Birmingham/UK this year. Attending GUADEC gave the students an opportunity to personally meet and socialize with other GNOME contributors. Several students are continuing to contribute to GNOME and are engaged in the development of different parts of the desktop and platform.

The GSoC administration team for GNOME is quite happy with the results of this year's edition. "I enjoyed quite a lot of this year's GSoC; our students did an amazing job working on various projects, touching everything in GNOME from our core libraries to some new end-user applications" said Vincent Untz, one of the GSoC admins for GNOME. "And the best part is seeing students stay in our community and making it rock even harder!" This year, the GNOME administration team improved the organization of the GSoC program inside the community by forming a committee to select the project proposals, keeping a closer look on a given projects progress, facilitating the sponsorship of several students to attend GUADEC and more.

Google Highly Open Participation Contest

With the great success of the GSoC program, Google decided to create a similar program aimed at high school students and introduced the Google Highly Open Participation Contest (GHOP). The program started in November of this year and ends February, 2008. In GHOP, instead of working on longer 3-months projects like in GSoC, the students can acomplish smaller tasks offered by the ten open source and free software projects that were invited by Google to participate in the pilot edition of the program. For every three tasks completed, the students receive a $100 USD prize from Google. GNOME was one of the invited projects together with Apache Software Foundation, Drupal, Joomla!, MoinMoin, Mono, Moodle, Plone, Python, and SilverStripe.

GNOME's GSoC admin team created a GHOP organization team composed of 14 members who were responsible for setting up the project's information pages and submitting approximately 50 initial tasks. The tasks were divided into seven categories (Code, Quality Assurance, Translation, User Interface, Documentation, Outreach, and Training) providing the students a varied set of tasks for different aptitudes. At the time of this writing, GNOME has a total of 65 tasks from which 41 have been already completed.

To date, GNOME's GHOP team regards the program's results as excellent. "It's really fun to work with all these highly motivated students!" affirms Andre Klapper, one of the GHOP organizers in GNOME. "The interest was so huge that we were sometimes afraid of running out of tasks. Thanks Google for making this possible and getting us new contributors." The students have reflected a similar enthusiasm. "I think GHOP is an awesome opportunity to jump in and get involved and I'm enjoying it a lot" said Natan Yellin, one of the GHOP students. "I think that there's a lot of positive energy here and we just have to channel it towards the right ideas".

In summary, both Google programs, GSoC and GHOP, have brought some very nice contributions and especially, new contributors, to GNOME. A big thank to Google for these amazing programs. We expect to have an even better organization, projects and results in our community next year.

GSoC Projects in 2007

New geometry manager for GTK+

Evolution Data Server backend for Google Calendar

GStreamer plugins and extensions for multimedia content creation applications

Display devices hotplugging support in GNOME

Extending the lockdown framework in GNOME

Photobooth-like application for the GNOME Desktop

Signal processing block for GStreamer

Timeline editing support for PiTiVi

Integrating Epiphany bookmarks and browsing history for GNOME-wide Access

Message threads enhancements in Evolution

WYSIWYG documentation editor for GNOME (application shell)

WYSIWYG documentation editor for GNOME (live editing backend)

Simple user-to-user file transfer without configuration in a LAN

Implement PDF Annotations support in Evince

Multiple pointers support in Metacity

Jokosher VoIP Integration

gnome-bluetooth and bluez-gnome improvements and unification

Mango enhancements to allow self-service of GNOME account data and streamline GNOME account setup

Input devices hotplugging support in GNOME

Development of the next art.gnome.org

Cross-application scripting for GNOME

VoIP and video call client using Telepathy

Next generation GNOME Scan application

Refactoring Deskbar-Applet

Face detection and tagging feature for F-Spot

Voice recognition applet for controlling the desktop

Design notes

See sketch here. The table "GSoC Projects in 2007" will have a descriptive title, student and mentor for each of the 27 projects.

2024-10-23 11:07