Difference between revisions of "SoC Report 2012"

Latest revision as of 04:39, 19 April 2013

Contact name: Anne Ghisla

OSGeo Google summer of Code participation in 2012

OSGeo participated to Google Summer of Code in 2012, with 20 of 22 students completing the summer. Several OSGeo projects took part to the program: QGIS, GRASS GIS, gvSIG, PostGIS, Geoserver, Opticks, OSSIM and GDAL. We also provided GSoC-specific umbrella support for two smaller projects from outside of our Foundation: pgRouting and uDig.

Key accomplishments

All in all our students were great and a lot of good work was completed -- perhaps the least remarkable-sounding but most important success we had is how smoothly everything ran in spite of handling our largest number of students yet. Many of our former students continue to be involved in our contributing projects' development and take on roles as mentors.

A couple of smaller external projects we have taken under our GSoC umbrella in the past are now participating in our incubation process to become full members of our Foundation. One of our multi-year GSoC projects (gvSIG mini) now headlines the F-droid (FOSS for Android) repository's homepage!

Areas for improvement

more cross-project collaboration: GSoC is a great opportunity to get code written, especially for the improvement of software communication. OSGeo projects vary from backend tools to end-user applications, that would all benefit from an improved communication.
full OSGeo projects' involvement: overall, only a half of OSGeo projects answered to the call for mentors, for many good reasons. How can OSGeo GSoC admins facilitate the participation of all projects? Suggestions are welcome. Administrators aim to accept at least one student from every OSGeo project.

Opportunities to help

Do you wish to participate to Google Summer of Code as mentor? Check the yearly administrative page to get all your questions answered.

All: feel free to propose project ideas for the students, on your pet project's Ideas page (full list here), and spread the word in universities and geospatial labs around the world.

Outlook for 2013

OSGeo has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013 - keep an eye on our wiki page!

@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
 Contact name: '''[[Anne Ghisla]]'''
-OSGeo participated in 2012, with 20 of 22 students completing the summer. We provided GSoC-specific umbrella support for two smaller projects from outside of our Foundation.
+== OSGeo Google summer of Code participation in 2012 ==
+OSGeo participated to [[Google_Summer_of_Code_2012|Google Summer of Code]] in 2012, with 20 of 22 students completing the summer. Several OSGeo projects took part to the program: QGIS, GRASS GIS, gvSIG, PostGIS, Geoserver, Opticks, OSSIM and GDAL. We also provided GSoC-specific umbrella support for two smaller projects from outside of our Foundation: pgRouting and uDig.
 === Key accomplishments ===
-Successes: All in all our students were great and a lot of good work was completed -- perhaps the least remarkable-sounding but most important success we had is how smoothly everything ran in spite of handling our largest number of students yet. Many of our former students continue to be involved in our contributing projects' development and take on roles as mentors. A couple of smaller external projects we have taken under our GSoC umbrella in the past are now participating in our incubation process to become full members of our Foundation. One of our multi-year GSoC projects (gvSIG mini) now headlines the F-droid (FOSS for Android) repository's homepage!
+All in all our students were great and a lot of good work was completed -- perhaps the least remarkable-sounding but most important success we had is how smoothly everything ran in spite of handling our largest number of students yet. Many of our former students continue to be involved in our contributing projects' development and take on roles as mentors.
+A couple of smaller external projects we have taken under our GSoC umbrella in the past are now participating in our incubation process to become full members of our Foundation. One of our multi-year GSoC projects (gvSIG mini) now headlines the F-droid (FOSS for Android) repository's homepage!
+=== Areas for improvement ===
+* ''more cross-project collaboration:'' GSoC is a great opportunity to get code written, especially for the improvement of software communication. OSGeo projects vary from backend tools to end-user applications, that would all benefit from an improved communication.
+* ''full OSGeo projects' involvement:'' overall, only a half of OSGeo projects answered to the call for mentors, for many good reasons. How can OSGeo GSoC admins facilitate the participation of all projects? Suggestions are welcome. Administrators aim to accept at least one student from every OSGeo project.
+=== Opportunities to help ===
+Do you wish to participate to Google Summer of Code as mentor? Check the yearly [[Google_Summer_of_Code_2013_Administrative|administrative page]] to get all your questions answered.
-Challenges: We require all projects have a backup mentor, and unfortunately had to make use of that this year. We had the fatal combination of a struggling-to-get-started student and a mentor who lost interest. In hindsight we felt that the mentor should have abandoned the project at mid-term and that we as admins should not have let the mentor over-extend himself, but even after the student lifted his game in the second half of the summer with a new direction, we (the admins) made the hard call to fail him on the final, to be paid half a summer's wages for half a summer's work. As a result, our slushy rules of one one-project per primary mentor and requiring detailed weekly status reports from students are now firmer, and we're more acutely aware of the need of earlier hands-on intervention by the admins.
+All: feel free to propose project ideas for the students, on your pet project's Ideas page ([[Google_Summer_of_Code_2013_Ideas|full list here]]), and spread the word in universities and geospatial labs around the world.
-Former GSoC student and mentor Anne G. smoothly transitioned into the role of lead admin from Wolf B., with Wolf and another long-serving co-admin standing by with advice. Since our umbrella is wide, we brought in an additional co-admin for better communication with mentors and projects that the other admins didn't know as well. Anne is a great communicator and has settled in well. (n.b. that wasn't written by her ;-)
+=== Outlook for 2013 ===
-OSGeo sent two delegates to the 2012 Mentor Summit, who chaired summit sessions on umbrella org admin'ing, geospatial FOSS, and humanitarian FOSS. We spent a lot of time comparing notes and ideas with other umbrella orgs and participating in Open Science sessions. We were lucky that our Foundation's long-serving president is now a Googler and could meet up with us on the side.
+OSGeo has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013 - keep an eye on our [[Google_Summer_of_Code_2013|wiki page]]!
 __notoc__