SoC Report 2015

OSGeo Google summer of Code participation in 2015

For Google Summer of Code 2015, the admins Margherita Di Leo and Anne Ghisla, and the mentors, selected 13 students, one for each project who provided mentoring support.

Key accomplishments

Our students this year were all successful, and developed the following projects:

GDAL - Faza Mahamood: Integration of GDAL utilities into GDAL core library

GRASS GIS - Matej Krejci: Improved Metadata for GRASS GIS

gvSIG - Eva Rodríguez: Port Network Analysis Extension to gvSIG 2.x branch

istSOS - Luca Ambrosini: Scalability for Big data processing for istSOS

JGRASSTOOLS - Silvia Franceschi: Development of a simple 1D hydraulic model for JGRASSTOOLS

MapServer - Samuel Lapointe: Add productivity tools to MapServer's ScribeUI

Opticks - Tom Van den Eynde: Image Enhancement/Background Suppression for Opticks

OTP - Nipuna Gunathilake: GTFS-Realtime validation tool for Open Trip Planner

OSGeo-Live - Massimo Di Stefano: Integration of geospatial OSS in educational notebooks

OSSIM - Martina Di Rita: OSSIM tool for DSM generation using tri-stereo and SAR imagery

pgRouting - Sarthak Agarwal: New osm2pgrouting import tool to import OpenStreetMap (OSM) data in pgRouting

PyWPS - Calin Ciociu: REST interface for PyWPS 4

QGIS - Marcus Santos: QGIS - Multithread support on QGIS Processing toolbox

At the GSoC 2015 Results page, the students provided detailed info on their achievements and directions how to test the applications they developed.

Participation to GSoC Mentor Summit

The admins have participated in person to the Mentors Summit, held at Google's headquarter in Mountain View. A short report can be found here. This was an important occasion to meet mentors and admins from other communities and exchange suggestions and views. It was noted that a stronger cooperation with other like-minded organization could be put in place.

Areas for improvement

OSGeo has participated to GSoC every summer since 2007, accepting 160+ students overall, from quite a few projects, both official OSGeo projects and endorsed guests. The rate of success has been overall quite high. However, there is always room for improvement.

From discussion with mentors, they find it difficult to judge the actual ability of a student in the selection phase. From next year on, we propose that students demonstrate their ability by submitting a non trivial patch to the project they apply for.

Another area to improve is to facilitate cross pollination among projects. We consider it a wonderful opportunity that the amazing software of OSGeo have the opportunity to interact with each other. Already this year we encouraged the development of cross projects by giving priority to them in assigning the available slots. We intend to keep on this line in the future.

Opportunities to help

None of our amazing results would have been possible without the dedications of our patient mentors, who voluntarily contributed their time. We owe them a lot and we want to encourage more developers and former GSoC students to join the mentors team.

If you want to know more on how to contribute, see the administrative page. Should you have any questions, feel free to email us admins.

Remember that the contribution of all members of the community is important as well. Feel free to propose ideas for the next year and discuss them in the dedicated mailing lists.

Personal contact and active seeking of good students is key for the good outcome of the program.

Thank you all for your collaboration!

Outlook for 2016

We admins intend to apply also next year as a mentoring organization - everybody cross their fingers..

If you want to join the admins team, let us know! We seek people with good communication skills, patience, some experience dealing with students, and the ability to answer emails within a day (in critical periods, even hours or minutes...). Ideally, a former experience as a GSoC student. If you think this is your very profile, please contact us!