Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentoring Organization Application

Organization Name (required)

The Eclipse Foundation

Description (required)

Eclipse is an open source community, whose projects are focused on building an open development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the life cycle. The Eclipse Foundation is a not-for-profit, member supported corporation that hosts the Eclipse projects and helps cultivate both an open source community and an ecosystem of complementary products and services. The Eclipse community consists of individuals and organizations from a cross section of the software industry.

Home page (required)

http://www.eclipse.org

Main Organization License: (required)

EPL

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating? (required)

As an organization, Eclipse has benefited significantly from past participation in the GSoC programme. Clearly, we benefit from the immediate value that we get in the form of code contributions. We are shipping code created by former GSoC student participants in our releases today. We also benefit from our ability to work directly with the students, and get to know them. They bring new ideas. In turn, they get to know us as an organization; the goodwill and mindshare that we develop with these experiences benefits us in the long run. Some of our former GSoC students have found employment through the programme (some of whom continue to work on projects at Eclipse). Some of our students have become mentors in subsequent years. GSoC students tell their friends about their positive experiences with us which then helps to grow the pool of people who participate in Eclipse projects and open source projects in general.

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs?(required)

If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

The Eclipse Foundation has participated in the GSoC since 2006. That year, eleven student proposals were selected. It's interesting that the list of people involved in that year reads like a "who's who" of the Eclipse Community. Former GSoC students from that year are now well-established Eclipse veterans who are responsible for writing code that has been adopted by numerous commercial products and downloaded millions of times. Many of our students from that year have been mentors in subsequent years; many of them will return to again mentor the next generation. In each of the years following, we have had on the order of 20 student projects accepted each year with similar results. We have had some failures, but most were overwhelming successes that have resulted in great value being added to Eclipse projects.

If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated (required)

e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006.

2010: 7/11, 2009: 19/20

What is the URL for your ideas page? (required)

http://wiki.eclipse.org/Google_Summer_of_Code_2010_Ideas

What is the main development mailing list for your organization? (required)

This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2010. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use.

https://dev.eclipse.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-dev

What is the main IRC channel for your organization? (required)

The official Eclipse SOC IRC channel is #eclipse-soc located on freenode.net. Everyone is welcome as it is not restricted to students and mentors.

Add a Comment (optional):

Students can additionally monitor and pose questions on #eclipse.

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? (required)

If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2010 site.

Abstract - Provide a short (one paragraph) description of your proposal.

Detailed Information - Provide more information about your proposal. Here you can provide some background information, list possible existing Eclipse projects that may provide a reasonable home for your work. What Eclipse technology will you leverage? What resources will you require to be successful? How will the Eclipse community benefit from your contribution?

Background - What work do you expect to do in the time leading up to the start of the GSoC programme? What background information will you need to get started and what do you plan to do to gather that information? What help do you need to gather that information?

Deliverables - What do you expect to deliver? Be as specific as possible.

Schedule - List a series of at least three milestones and what you expect to have accomplished for each.

Expectations - What do you expect from your mentor? What help are you going to need? (e.g. will you need help learning about Eclipse plug-in development, or about any specific features of Eclipse that you'll need to leverage as part of your project?).

Contact Information - Tell us a bit about yourself. A paragraph that states your work and education experience should suffice. We don't want your resume. Let us know why you are a worthwhile investment of our time. Please provide an email address that we can use to contact you.

What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? (required)

Please be as specific as possible.

In the simplest possible terms, we select only mentors that we know ("we" being the current group of mentors). We're very careful to accept only those mentors who we know are familiar with the necessary processes at eclipse.org, and who will provide the best possible experience for the students. Most of our mentors are committers on Eclipse projects, but not all need be.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? (required)

We will make every reasonable effort to chase them down using the resources that are available to us. We will continue the strategy that we've employed in the past: our mentors will make regular efforts to communicate. Ultimately, if a student choses to abandon their work, there's little that we can do about it. If our communication efforts fail, we will reflect the failure on either the mid-term or final report (our mentors take the responsibility inherent in participating in GSoC very seriously).

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? (required)

In the past, we've had success with layering our mentors "two deep". That is, we have generally had both a primary and a backup mentor for each student project. We will continue this in 2010. We implemented this to accommodate for vacation time for mentors; while we have not needed this safety net to deal with "disappearing mentors" in the past, it should work well for those purposes should the need arise.

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

The Eclipse landscape is pretty complex, so it's vitally important that a student get involved with the community early. As we better understand the project ideas brought forth by students, we direct them to the resources associated with the Eclipse project that best aligns with the work they intend to do. We explain to each student how our community works and attempt to instill an understanding of the value of openness and transparency in open source development. We encourage students to use public communication channels (IRC, newsgroups/forums, mailing lists, etc.) as much as possible, as early as possible in the term. Past experience has shown that gentle reminders are often required to ensure that the students do not fall into a habit of private communication.

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes? (required)

We recognize that it is in our own best interests to keep the students on-board with the project for the long term. With this in mind, we treat students with the same care and respect that we treat professionals who come to our projects with contributions. We also recognize, however, that students do not have the same technical background and experience as professional software developers, and so we take care to make sure that they are able to get access to the resources and information that they need. We do this in part by making sure that each project has at least two mentors watching it. This mitigates the risk that a student may be left hanging for an answer and--given that the two mentors have different backgrounds--increases the chances that the mentors will be able to help with broad range of topics. Further, we expose the students to the Eclipse community which gives them an opportunity to showcase themselves on a relatively large stage. Many of our past students have been able to leverage that into full time employment and other interesting opportunities. Ulimately, we keep the experience as positive as possible.

Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team? (required)

This is a fantastic programme that brings incredible value to our community. We thank you for your time, energy, and care.