openSUSE:GCI 2012 Application Form
GCI Organization Application Form
This is the information we used to fill our application form for GCI 2012.
Organization id
opensuse
Organization name
openSUSE Project
Organization description
openSUSE is a community project to promote the use of Linux everywhere, focusing on the openSUSE distribution itself but also on infrastructure tools like the Build Service, that are used by other projects (Meego, for example). The openSUSE project delivers everything that developers and enthusiasts need to get started with Linux. We are a worldwide project, with a community of people with different levels of expertise, speaking different languages and having different cultural backgrounds, and we embrace a wide variety of technology. We rely on contributions from the community and this is why we have opened the access to our development process, and we are working on extensive community development programs.
Organization home page url
Main Organization License
GNU General Public License (GPL)
Why has your org chosen to participate in Google Code-in?
We are applying for many different reasons:
- we hope to attract new members in our community via our participation. This includes the students who would participate, but also people who would look at our project ideas and find that what we're working on is fun!
- we want to integrate the results of GSoC as soon as possible, to move the openSUSE project forward faster.
- we believe the project ideas we have are covering many different topics and technologies, from deep low-level C code to Ruby on Rails, and those will be of interest to potential participants.
- and of course, we love GSoC because it's a good way to introduce new students to free software in general, and it has now become a tradition in our world :-)
Please list the years your organization has participated in Google Summer of Code.
2006, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012
What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for Google Code-in 2010-11. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use.
mailto:opensuse-project@opensuse.org
To subscribe, please see http://en.opensuse.org/Communicate/Mailinglists#Development_Lists
What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
#opensuse-project (on freenode)
Please provide a link to your task ideas page. This is much like the ideas page for Google Summer of Code but must include at least 5 tasks in all of the 8 categories sorted by difficulty level.
http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:GCI_tasks
Please tell us about how your organization has prepared for Google Code-in, including what (and how many) mentors and organization administrators have agreed to help, what your schedule and response time will be during the holidays (and otherwise during the contest period) and how you plan to deal with unresponsive mentors.
While organizing Code-in for openSUSE, we had a look at the list of our Junior Jobs page (http://en.opensuse.org/Junior_jobs) and also asked our mentors on the projects which they would like to mentor on. This enabled us to create a very healthy balance between our mentors' interest so that they are motivated and also the project's interest. We are also taking care that the tasks are explained as precisely as possible so that it would not be very difficult for students to understand.
Currently, we have 1 administrators( as of now ),Manu Gupta acting as the backup admin. We just started recruiting our mentors, and we have an initial set of 7 mentors; this will certainly increase by the time we submit our applications. Our mentors have been supporting and helping the community for a long time and also have long term experiences in the categories allotted. Usually our response time will be from 24 hours to 48 hours during weekdays.
openSUSE is very well aware of the holiday period during the code-in period. So during our preparations, we are explicitly asking our mentors to state an approximation of the time period they will be available during the contest period. That helps us to know well in advance the time that a mentor will be able to comment. Furthermore, we have divided the tasks with the 8 categories as mentioned by Google along with some of our own with their individual set of mentors. This ensures that even if we for some unforeseen reason, a mentor leaves during the contest period, the contest carries on smoothly as there will be other mentors available to mentor those tasks.