Organization Page

General

• Post a call to the Profs and Wimis of the institute
• Win around 5-7 mentors, 3 backup mentors, 1 backup administrator.
• Have around 10 proposals
• Apply in time
• Wait for acceptance
• Post a call to the students

Call for participation

Liebe Professoren, Liebe Wimis, momentan laufen die Bewerbungen zum Google Summer of Code [1] und es stellt sich die Frage, ob der Fachbereich MI sich nicht geschlossen als betreuende Organisation bewerben möchte, um so die Chancen für eine Teilnahme zu steigern.

Kurzer Abriss des Programms: Google bezahlt Studierenden 3 Monate für die Teilnahme an Projekten unter Open Source Lizenz. Hierzu bewerben sich zuerst betreuende Organisationen (wir z.B.), welche Projektvorschläge für die Studierenden erstellen und Mentoren zur Verfügung stellen. Google wählt aus den Bewerbungen interessante Projekte aus und Studierende bewerben sich dann auf diese. Gezahlt werden 4500 USD an den Studierenden und 500 USD an die betreuende Organisation.

Sich bewerbende Organisationen sind in der Mehrzahl Open Source Projekte wie z.B. FreeBSD, Apache, Drupal, aber auch ein paar universitäre Einrichtungen haben sich erfolgreich letztes Jahr bewerben können. So z.B.

Center for the Study of Complex Systems (CSCS), University of Michigan http://code.google.com/soc/2007/cscs/about.html

National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent), Phyloinformatics Group http://code.google.com/soc/2007/iem/about.html

Robert H. Lurie Comprehensive Cancer Center of Northwestern University http://code.google.com/soc/2007/lurie/about.html

Die Bewerbung als Organisation [2] würde die AGSE übernehmen, ihr müsstet nur…

a.) Projekte vorschlagen (eine sehr kurze Beschreibung von ca. 10 Zeilen genügt siehe z.B. [3][4][5])

b.) Mentoren für diese bereitstellen

Wer Interesse hat, melde sich bitte bei mir bis spätestens morgen 18:00. Ich würde dann bei hinreichendem Interesse eine Seite im Wiki einrichten, auf der ihr eure Projektvorschläge eintragen könnt und alles weitere erledigen.

Gruß, Christopher

[1] Summer of Code FAQ http://code.google.com/soc/2008/faqs.html

[2] Summer of Code Bewerbungsformular für Organisationen http://code.google.com/soc/2008/org_signup.html

[3] Beispiele für Projektvorschläge https://www.nescent.org/wg/phyloinformatics/index.php?title=Phyloinformatics_Summer_of_Code_2007#Ideas

[4] Beispiele für Projektvorschläge http://wiki.apache.org/general/SummerOfCode2007

[5] Beispiele für Projektvorschläge http://www.basic.northwestern.edu/projects/SoC07/index.html

Application

• Describe your organization.
  • Freie Universität Berlin is one of the top ten research universities in Germany and with over 30000 students one of the largest universities in Germany as well. The computer science institute has build up a strong reputation over the last years with successful participation in robosoccer (http://robocup.mi.fu-berlin.de/) and the DARPA challenge (http://robotics.mi.fu-berlin.de/) or by organizing the web programming language contest Plat_Forms (http://www.plat-forms.org/). The CS institute is a strong supporter of the Open Source idea with numerous projects being available under OSI licenses (for instance Simple Interactive Object eXtraction (SIOX, http://www.siox.org/) or the open-source framework for mass spectrometry http://open-ms.sourceforge.net) and a regular focus on Open Source topics in teaching.

• Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?
  • The institute for computer science is participating to give back to the Open Source community that we rely on heavily as the base of many research projects. PhD students from the institute have volunteered to mentor students in projects these students are actively participating. We hope to help students to become more closely involved with the Open Source community and contribute results from science back into the individual projects. All proposals put up by us are directly linked with active research projects, so we also hope to gain new ideas by students for these projects.

• What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
  • Mentors are PhD students from the CS department who have volunteered to put up project proposals and mentor students during the summer term. Since most PhD students at the institute have experience with teaching and as thesis advisors we believe they are highly qualified as mentors.

• What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
  • Since development is done in source code versioning systems, there is little harm that can be done by a student disappearing during the course of the project (which ultimately is not possible to prevent). On the other hand, the experience with advising students on their thesis projects recommends to stay in close contact with the student through-out the project, encourage and motivate them on a regular basis and demand weekly status reports for tracking their progress and supporting their development from the get-go.

• What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
  • All mentors are PhD students with teaching or research assistantships at the computer science institute so that they won't just disappear. All mentors have promised to have sufficient time to guide the students during the course of the projects. We have contacted three additional PhD students to become fallback mentors in case something unforeseen happens to any of our core mentors.

• What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
  • All our projects have very open ways of discussing and are open for the students to participate. We can offer to students to even come here to Berlin to work directly at our university site (of course students would have to pay for their travel expenses and get visas, etc. but we could help them with finding housing for the 3 summer months).

• What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
  • Most of the ideas we have proposed are part of long-running projects that are conducted as part of PhD thesis. Usually each of these projects has several openings for additional tasks that could be done by the student, so we will advertise these available ideas, for which often also theses are possible. In addition we will encourage the students during their Summer of Code participation to become owners of individual code modules, which should also increase the likelyhood of them sticking.

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