Live GIS Disc GSoC 2010

About the Live DVD
The OSGeo Live DVD code-named Arramagong, packages a stack of 35 of the best Geospatial Open Source applications onto an Xubuntu based linux distribution.

From the Arramagong DVD, people can trial the best GeoSpatial Open Source Software without installing any applications on their computer. It is a very powerful marketing tool for Open Source, ideal for handing out at conferences or to be used as the basis for Open Source training courses.

The DVD also comes with some windows installers for many of the GeoSpatial applications.

About OSGeo's involvement in GSoC
This is the OSGeo LiveDVD page for Google Summer of Code 2010. Here we will list project ideas and and other information related to the LiveDVD projects.


 * Official Google Summer of Code 2010 homepage
 * OSGeo SoC 2010 homepage

Promotion: OSGeo Flyer at http://svn.osgeo.org/osgeo/marketing/flyer/google_summer_of_code/OSGeo_GSoC_2010.pdf Videos at     http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/Videos More Flyers at http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/GsocFlyers

Timeline
(GSoC timeline)


 * Mentoring organization applications open (March 8-12)


 * Accepted mentoring organizations announced (March 18)


 * Interested students should initiate preliminary discussions with projects (March 18-29)


 * Student applications open (March 29)
 * Deadline for student's applications (April 9)
 * Registering your application early (before the deadline) allows us to give you feedback for revisions before the final deadline, enhancing your proposal and thus giving you a better chance of success.


 * Mentor assignments and application reviews deadline (April 21)


 * Accepted proposals announced (April 26)


 * Community bonding time (getting to know the students)


 * Work Begins (May 24)


 * Midterm evaluation (July 12-16)


 * Pencils down! (August 9)
 * Final evaluations submitted to Google (August 16)

Required Steps

 * List ideas
 * Assign Mentors to Ideas
 * Notify OSGeo
 * Mentors evaluate student applications
 * Accepted students announced
 * Students subscribe to email list and introduce themselves
 * Set up SVN access
 * Create a Wiki page for each accepted project, to be used as a progress reporting tool
 * Coding begins...
 * Students and mentors: Complete the Mid-term survey
 * Final commit and packaging for Google

Ideas

 * Project ideas of your own are also most welcome.

Automated testing of all projects
Willing to Mentor: Cameron Shorter

The LiveDVD contains a simple list of test steps for each geospatial application here: http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Disc_Testing.

Many project also have their own automated testing systems.

What would be very useful would be one, or a set of automated testing processes, which would run all applications and verify they work. We encourage students to suggest Open Source testing frameworks which should be applied to Open Source Geospatial applications.

This project would contribute significantly to OSGeo Software Quality by providing a systematic testing process.

Multi-language support
Willing to Mentor: (your name here)

Consistent dataset across projects
Willing to Mentor: Cameron Shorter

Currently applications have all been packaged with their own datasets. This results in multiple, similar datasets all on the DVD taking up valuable room. It also makes it difficult to compare the different applications.

This project would involve aligning all projects to use a core set of datasets. It would likely involve updating documentation for many of the applications.

While this project is valuable, it probably won't contain enough software development, and would require liaison with too many stakeholders to make it a worthy SoC candidate.

Accepted Ideas

 * TBD