2007 Google SoC Application

1. Describe your organization.

OSGeo is an incorporated not-for-profit organization serving as an umbrella organization for the Open Source Geospatial community in general, and 12 projects in particular.

2. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2007? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We hope to get more students involved in open source geospatial development to grow the development community, and to advance particular projects.

3. Did your organization participate in GSoC 2005 or 2006? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects.

OSGeo was formed in early 2006 and hasn't participated in GSoC in previous years. However, Refractions Research did participate in 2006 on behalf of the GeoTools, uDig, and PostGIS projects which will be participating through OSGeo. The previously participating mentors and administrator from 2006 are supporting the OSGeo 2007 effort.

4. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

Refractions Research participated in 2006, and sent 2 delegates to the mentor conference.

5. Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.

Frank Warmerdam, OSGeo President - account: fwarmerdam

6. What license does your project use?

Different projects operate under a variety of OSI approved licenses, mainly GPL, LGPL, and MIT/X.

7. What is the URL for your ideas page?

fill in - transfer from http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Google_Summer_of_Code#Project_Ideas_Lists

8. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

discuss@lists.osgeo.org - see http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss

add discussion lists for active projects

• GeoServer - geoserver-devel@lists.sourceforge.net ( details )
• GeoTools - geotools-devel@lists.sourceforge.net ( details )
• uDig - udig-devel@lists.refractions.net ( details )
• MapGuide
  • mapguide-users@lists.osgeo.org ( details )
  • mapguide-internals@lists.osgeo.org ( details )
• OpenJUMP - jump-pilot-devel@lists.sourceforge.net ( details )

9. What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

1. osgeo on irc.freenode.net

list irc channels for active projects

• irc://freenode/#geoserver
• irc://freenode/#geotools
• irc://freenode/#udig
• irc://freenode/#mapguide

10. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

consider

11. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.

Landon Blake - sunburned.surveyor [] gmail.com

12. Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account Information.

to fill in

• jody.garnett [] gmail.com (Jody Garnett) - available for uDig, GeoTools, GeoServer
• hobuisu [] gmail.com (Howard Butler) - available for GDAL
• jason.birch [] gmail.com (Jason Birch) - MapGuide
• pagameba [] gmail.com (Paul Spencer) - MapGuide
• trevor.wekel [] autodesk.com (Trevor Wekel) - MapGuide
• sunburned.surveyor [] gmail.com (Landon Blake) - OpenJUMP

13. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

Mentors are selected by project steering committees based on their reputation as skilled developers, previously demonstrated ability to support new project developers, and stated willingness to devote time to the mentoring process.

14. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Plan A:

In order to minimize the likelyhood of disappearing students we will ensure that we have full contact information (email, home phone, etc) so that we can keep in touch with them.

In addition, we will make our reporting requirements clear up front. Letting the students know that we will require weekly blog-based progress reports, and participation on public IRC channels and mailing lists will all ensure ongoing commitment to the work.

On our side, we will ensure that our mentors are providing the student with enough guidance by requiring that all communications are held in public channels, reducing the risk of students giving up because they are not receiving enough direction.

Plan B:

Leveraging Open Source software from the OSGeo stack, coupled with high-accuracy data sources, volunteers from the open source community will process the data, including student metadata, and the results will be used for the targeting instructions for high-powered space-based lasers. Results of this will be displayed on a large video wall, which will prove that the student really has disappeared, and should act as a deterrent to future student disappearances.

http://www.jasonbirch.com/files/space_lasers.jpg (resized from )

15. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

This will be a public process, and the entire community will be aware of the students' process. This will allow for strong internal awareness, and project steering committees will appoint replacement mentors if existing mentors become unavailable or unresponsive during the project period. We considered a strategy similar to disappearing students "Plan B", but we really can't afford to lose some of these mentors.

16. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

to fill in

The steps taken depend on the individual projects, as example last year GeoTools project has asked for weekly attendence at IRC meetings or status email.

Other possibilities include:

1. Having potential students work with their potential mentor to prepare a brief plan for the implementation of their project.
2. Setting milestones that need to be reached by the student. These milestones would be defined before the student's work begins. A student would subsequently write a brief e-mail informing the appropriate OSGeo or project-specific mailing list when they have reached a milestone, giving a brief description of the work completed to that date.

17. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

to fill in

The steps taken depend on the individual projects, as example last year GeoTools project asked that students act as a "module maintainer" for their work. This role has an expected level of support associated with it.

Apart from that, we are relying on the open development process and the appreciation that students will receive for implementing these needed features to provide positive feedback for the students. The projects will be encouraging the students to take ownership of their work, and to contribute in other areas they may be interested in.

Other possibilities include:

1. Asking the students to identify their greatest challenges in working on the project, and asking them to identify ways to overcome those challenges.
2. Asking the students to provide input and advice on the next Summer of Code project, and possibly serving as a mentor if their experience merits that.