linkid: gnome
Group Name: GNOME
Public email: sadam@gnome.org
1. Description
GNOME offers an easy to understand desktop for your GNU/Linux or UNIX computer.
2. Why is your group applying to participate? What do you hope to gain by participating?
We would like to encourage students to become long term contributing community members. Several active members of our community were at one time SoC students including one of our administrators this year.
3. What is the main public mailing list for your group?
4. Where is the main IRC channel for your group?
GIMPNet #gnome-hackers
5. What criteria do you use to select the members of your group? Please be as specific as possible.
Our mentors and administrators are drawn from active developers and project maintainers in the GNOME community. Many of those that will be mentors have served as such before or been SoC students themselves. While the exact mentors haven't been selected yet, they will usually be the maintainer or lead developer of a project that the student wishes to contribute to.
This year's maintainers were active in aiding last year's with suggesting project ideas, selecting student's proposals and mentoring projects.
6. Has your group participated previously? If so, please summarize your involvement and any past successes and failures.
GNOME has participated every year Google has sponsored a Summer of Code. Some of our successes are sponsoring students to attend our summer European conference, GUADEC, the Cheese project has become a part of GNOME and it's maintainer is an admin this year, other students have taken up places in other projects under GNOME's auspices. Our first year in the program we realized that none of our applicants were women and used the money allocated to the mentoring organization to fund the Women's Summer Outreach Program. It was organized along the same lines as SoC, but was only open to female applicants. Since then we have had female students in the program and I think it has made us as a community more welcoming.
Our greatest failures in the program are those students who fail to complete the program. In 2007, my own student failed out. This has taught me the value of appraising student's level of engagement during the "getting to know each other" phase and trying to make corrections early on instead of waiting till the mid-term or end of the program.
7. License
GPL
8. What is the URL to the ideas list of your organization?
http://live.gnome.org/SummerOfCode2009/Ideas
9. What is the main development mailing list for your group?
10. What is the application template you would like contributors to your organization to use.
# What is the ultimate goal of your proposal?
# What components/modules will it touch/change or create?
# What benefits does it have for GNOME and its community?
# Why you'd like to complete this particular project?
# How do you plan to achieve completion of your project?
- It really helps to see a schedule with dates and important milestones/deliveries.
# Why do you think you are be the best person to work on this project?
- There are usually several proposals for the most popular ideas and we want to know what makes you stand out from the crowd.
# What are your past experiences (if any) with the open source world?
# Why are you interested in improving GNOME?
# Please attach a link to a bug (bugzilla.gnome.org or other Free software tracker) containing a patch you've written.
11. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing contributors?
To keep tabs on contributors, we ask them to file weekly progress reports with soc-list@gnome.org and on their blogs which we syndicate on planet.gnome.org. If a student is late to file and their mentor can't reach them, an administrator will try to contact them to see if there are any issues we can help solve either in their personal lives or between them and their mentor.
12. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing members?
If we are contacted by a student complaining of a unresponsive mentor we will contact the mentor and see if there's been a misunderstanding. In the event of a truly AWOL mentor, we will find a suitable replacement from the community or one of the administrators will take over.
13. What steps will you take to encourage contributors to interact with your community before, during, and after the program?
We are asking students to contribute a patch to one of our projects and attach a link to it with their proposal. This will help us determine a minimum level of comprehension of Free software community practices. During the program, their blogs will be added to planet.gnome.org and the opportunity to attend our summer conference, GUADEC, will be available to them. After the program they will be welcome to stay and contribute and take up active positions in the community. If they choose to stay, their blog will remain syndicated on planet.gnome.org where they will have a broad audience for any of their Free software endeavours.
14. What will you do to ensure that your accepted contributors stick with the project after the program concludes?
Our goal over the summer is to make them feel welcome as members of the community and we will continue that afterward. We take great pains to publicise their contributions and successes and give them a sense of ownership and responsibility over their bit of code.