Organization Id
gnome
Organization name
GNOME
Organization description
GNOME offers an easy to understand desktop for your GNU/Linux or UNIX computer. We also work as an umbrella project for many end-user-oriented applications that people use on their desktop.
Organization home page url
Main organization license
GPL
What is the URL for your ideas page?
http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2012/Ideas
What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
GIMPNet (irc.gnome.org) #gnome-hackers
GIMPNet (irc.gnome.org) #soc
#gnome-hacker is the main hacker point of contact, #soc is used for Summer of Code related communication
What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating?
We would like to encourage students to become long term contributing community members. Many active members of our community were at one time SoC students including two of our administrators this year.
Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
GNOME has participated every year Google has sponsored a Summer of Code, guiding over 100 students in the processes. Some of our successes are: sponsoring students to attend our main conference (GUADEC), successful long-term adoption of GSoC results (e.g. the Cheese project which has become a part of GNOME and it's maintainer is an admin since three years) and numerous students which have taken up places in other projects under GNOME's auspices.
In our second year in the program we realized that none of our applicants were women and used the money allocated to the mentoring organization to fund the Women's Summer Outreach Program in 2006. It was organized along the same lines as SoC, but was only open to female applicants. After we didn't see a significant improvement in the number of female applicants for SoC, we organized Outreach Program for Women internships again in 2011 and are organizing them this year too. In addition to 8 Outreach Program for Women interns in the summer of 2011, we had 7 successful female applicants for Google Summer of Code. The women outreach effort makes our community more welcoming and helps us create the resources for all newcomers.
Our greatest failures in the program are those students who fail to complete the program. This has taught us the value of appraising student's level of engagement during the "getting to know each other" phase and trying to make corrections early on instead of waiting till the mid-term or end of the program. Because of that we try to follow the student as close as possible and try to be helpful at any time.
If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
2005 till 2011
Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
- What is your e-mail address and IRC nick?
- Do you have a web page, blog, or microblog?
- What is your academic background?
- What is the ultimate goal of your proposal?
- What components/modules will the proposed work modify or create?
- What benefits does your proposed work have for GNOME and its community?
- Why are you the right person to work on this project?
- How do you plan to achieve completion of your project?
- It really helps to see a schedule with dates and important milestones/deliveries (preferably in two weeks increments).
- What will showable at mid-term [1]?
- What are your past experiences with the open source world as a user and as a contributor?
- Please include a link to the bug you fixed for the GNOME module your proposal is related to.
- If available, please include links to any other code you wrote for GNOME or other open source projects.
- What other relevant projects have you worked on previously and what knowledge you gained from working on them?
[1] All students are invited to attend GUADEC and present their project there, which is right after the midterm evaluation deadline.
What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible.
Our mentors and administrators are drawn from active developers and project maintainers in the GNOME community. Many of those that will be mentors have served as such before or been SoC students themselves. While the exact mentors haven't been selected yet, they will usually be the maintainer or lead developer of a project that the student wishes to contribute to.
Our team of administrators has now several years of experience administrating our participation in SoC.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
To keep tabs on contributors, we ask them to file weekly progress reports with gnome-soc-list@gnome.org and on their blogs which we syndicate on planet.gnome.org. If a student is late to file and their mentor can't reach them, an administrator will try to contact them to see if there are any issues we can help solve either in their personal lives or between them and their mentor.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
If we are contacted by a student complaining of a unresponsive mentor we will contact the mentor and see if there's been a misunderstanding. In the event of a truly AWOL mentor, we will find a suitable replacement from the community or one of the administrators will take over. This was actually the case in 2009, where we quickly found another mentor and the student could successfully finish his project.
What steps will you take to encourage contributors to interact with your community before, during, and after the program?
We are asking students to contribute a patch to one of our projects and attach a link to it with their proposal. This will help us determine a minimum level of comprehension of Free Software community practices. During the program, their blogs will be added to planet.gnome.org and the opportunity to attend our summer conference, GUADEC, will be available to them (the GNOME Foundation will make an effort to sponsor (part of) their travel expenses). After the program they will be welcome to stay and contribute and take up active positions in the community. If they choose to stay, their blog will remain syndicated on planet.gnome.org where they will have a broad audience for any of their Free Software endeavours.
Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.