Difference between revisions of "BeagleBoard/GSoC/Application"

From eLinux.org
Jump to: navigation, search
(What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?)
(If you answered “yes” to the question above please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.)
(47 intermediate revisions by 3 users not shown)
Line 3: Line 3:
 
[[Category:Development Boards]]
 
[[Category:Development Boards]]
 
[[Category: BeagleBoard]]
 
[[Category: BeagleBoard]]
''Applying to Google Summer of Code''
+
[[Category: GSoC]]
 
 
Borrowed from http://sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/SL_application.  See http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/AdviceforMentors for more advice.  To learn to navigate the actual Google Summer of Code website, see http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2010/userguide.
 
  
 
==How does a mentoring organization apply?==
 
==How does a mentoring organization apply?==
  
The organization should choose a single administrator to submit its application via the GSoC web app before March 11, 2010.
+
The organization should choose a single administrator to submit its application via the Google Summer of Code 2014 site between February 3 - February 14 2014.
  
 
:Jason Kridner will be the administrator, but is looking for volunteers to help edit the application contents and to update the ideas.
 
:Jason Kridner will be the administrator, but is looking for volunteers to help edit the application contents and to update the ideas.
Line 19: Line 17:
  
 
===Description===
 
===Description===
BeagleBoard.org is a volunteer community behind building powerful and open ARM-based systems based on the same processors used is in popular high-end Android phones today. The vision is to enable much lower-power and lower-cost computing platforms that can be embedded into designs with confined spaces, limited batteries and innovative user interfaces (web browsers available in every situation). The design is "open source hardware" with all of the schematic, bill-of-materials, layout, etc. shared for building other devices. The software is open source generated by the community, such as the Angstrom Distribution, Ubuntu, Android and other Linux distributions. Compiler tools are free and the board is available at a low cost--free to any student participating in a BeagleBoard.org related GSoC project.
+
BeagleBoard.org is an open source community of experienced hackers, hobbyists and engineers who are enthusiastic about  building powerful,open ARM-based systems based on the same processors used is in popular, high-end Android phones today. BeagleBoard.org’s vision is to improve access to small, low-power computing platforms that can be embedded into new creations using easy to use development tools, such as the web-based IDE. The hardware designs of all Beagle boards are open source with all schematics, bills-of-materials, layouts, etc. shared for building other devices. The software is also open source and is generated by the community(such as the Angstrom Distribution, Ubuntu, Android and other Linux distributions). Compiler tools are free and the board is available at a low cost. Boards will be provided for free to any student participating in a BeagleBoard.org-related GSoC project.
  
Texas Instruments sponsors some BeagleBoard.org related activities and the first members of the community were TI employees, but the collaboration base is now over 3,500 members on the mailing list, over 20,000 individual developers having purchased development hardware around the world, and the IRC channel typically has over 150 developers on-line at any given time. Existing projects are often for the purpose of building robots, autonomous flying drones, automotive entertainment and navigation systems, home media centers, digital signs, wearable computers or gaming consoles and include versions of Android, Ubuntu, Angstrom, Gentoo, FFmpeg, XBMC, ROS, OpenCV and much more (with over 200 projects registered at http://beagleboard.org/project).
+
Texas Instruments sponsors a number of BeagleBoard.org-related activities and the first members of the community were TI employees, however, the collaboration base is now stronger than ever with over 5,000 members on the mailing list, over 100,000 individual developers worldwide who have purchased Beagle hardware and over 150 developers who actively participate on the live chat (IRC channel) at any given time. Existing projects are often for the purpose of building robots, autonomous flying drones, automotive entertainment and navigation systems, home media centers, digital signs, wearable computers, gaming consoles and even 3d printers! (over 380 projects registered at http://beagleboard.org/project/) Existing software compatibility includes various versions of Android, Ubuntu, Angstrom, Gentoo, FFmpeg, XBMC, ROS, OpenCV and much more.
  
 
===Home page===
 
===Home page===
Line 29: Line 27:
 
GPLv2
 
GPLv2
  
===Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?===
+
===Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2014? What do you hope to gain by participating?===
We hope to grow our base of developers interested in embedded and heterogeneous multi-core software development environments that provide long-term power and performance advantages over the limited use cases of desktop and existing mobile computers. We hope to enable those developers to apply the core components running on the BeagleBoard to take computing into more environments and with new environmental interactions.
+
By participating in GSoC 2014, we hope to inspire open source developers interested in physical computing, especially when it involves high-level operating systems and heterogeneous processor environments. In doing so, developers will be enabled to apply the core components running on BeagleBoard to more environments and with new environmental interactions.
  
Beyond the basic technology issues, we hope to create better versions of popular open source applications for the low-cost/low-power platform and the ARM, C6000, and SGX processors contained within it. Because the BeagleBoard is open source hardware, software designed on it can be taken and put in entirely new products.
+
We hope to increase general interest in computers and electronics through improved access, simplified interfaces and example projects.
  
===If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC?===
+
Because the Beagle platform is open source hardware, any software designed on it can be taken and put into entirely new products. Because we focus most of our support on Linux, we enable software developed in our projects to be easily used in other systems.
No
 
  
===Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.===
+
===Has your organization participated in past Google Summer of Codes?===
Yes.  Students advanced the state of the XBMC media center application on ARM, OpenCV using heterogeneous processing systems, FFTs on ARM, pulse width modulation under Linux, compilation and invocation of heterogeneous processor functions under Linux and USB bus analysis under Linux.
+
Yes.
  
We had an excellent set of mentors with 3 mentors for every student to ensure high availability of mentor time via the IRC channel. Our mentors had deep knowledge relevant to the projects and were able to assist the students in each of their technical challenges.  We monitored student progress with weekly blog posts and IRC meetings to keep them on track and resolve any blocking issues. We collected short video presentations introducing each project, giving observers a good idea of the students' goals.  We screened out projects that wouldn't provide sufficiently reusable software for the rest of the community.
+
===How many potential mentors do you have for this year's program? What criteria did you use to select them?===
 +
We currently have 20 potential mentors for this year's program of which only 4 haven't previously mentored in GSoC. We've removed mentors from previous years who were under motivated to help students succeed and brought on mentors who have contributed significantly to our projects or related projects either through documentation or implementation. Most of our potential mentors are also in frequent contact with each other through IRC, Google+ and our primary developer mailing list to have confidence they can work together well.
  
We had some challenges shipping hardware to students on a timely basis and them getting charged taxes upon receipt, but we have plans in place to make it run smoother this year by getting local TI or other company offices involved. Getting local business offices involved would also enable a bit more face-to-face interaction as we can also invite local mentors to local meet-ups at those offices.  Not all the code was directly adopted by the upstream projects and made available across the BeagleBoard community. Integration into a distribution will be a requirement this time to help with making the software more available to the BeagleBoard community and greater emphasis will be given on following up with upstream developers.  More focus will be given to projects directly impacting the BeagleBoard community, rather than relying on upstream projects that might not be fundamentally motivated to adopt the patches.
+
===If you answered “yes” to the question above please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.===
 +
BeagleBoard.org GSoC students have:
 +
* improved the Linux kernel support for analog-to-digital converters, software-based pulse width modulators and USB bus analysis,
 +
* implemented network protocols for booting a remote processor from Android, Linux or Windows hosts,
 +
* implemented Arduino-compatible software on top of Linux (code used by other hardware platforms, eg. Intel Galileo),
 +
* improved the functionality of Minix for operating system education,
 +
* improved the integration and performance on ARM or DSP processors of ROS, XBMC, FFTW and OpenCV,
 +
* and delivered a framework for compilation and invocation of heterogeneous processor functions.  
  
===If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006.===
+
We had an excellent set of mentors with 3 mentors for every student to ensure high availability of mentor time via the IRC channel. Our mentors had deep knowledge relevant to the projects and were able to assist the students in each of their technical challenges. We monitored student progress with weekly blog posts and IRC meetings to keep them on track and resolve any blocking issues. We collected short video presentations introducing each project, giving observers a good idea of the students' goals. We screened out projects that wouldn't provide sufficiently reusable software for the rest of the community.
2010: 6/6
 
  
===What is the URL for your ideas page?===
+
Including a hardware component adds some challenges when shipping around the world. We learned from our participation in 2010 that we could use local businesses to help improve our worldwide shipping to get hardware to the students on-time (though we also found that more students already had hardware). In general, getting hardware to students is one of the more onerous challenges we have, but we've eliminated it as a road block.
http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard/GSoC/Ideas
 
  
===WWhat 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 GSoC 2011. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use.===
+
Getting more face-to-face interaction continues to be a challenge, but our IRC interactions are strong and we've started to incorporate Google Hangouts in our collaboration.
http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard: All things BeagleBoard
 
http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard-gsoc: GSoC-specific things for BeagleBoard.org
 
  
===What is the main IRC channel for your organization?===
+
We've greatly improved our success rate in getting code adopted by the upstream projects and made available across the BeagleBoard community by making integration into a distribution will be a requirement, giving greater emphasis on following up with upstream developers and focusing on projects directly impacting the BeagleBoard community, rather than relying on upstream projects that might not be fundamentally motivated to adopt the patches.
irc.freeenode.net #beagle
 
  
About you
+
Pass/fail rate for 2010: 6 pass 0 fail
  
# What is your name?
+
Pass/fail rate for 2013: 6 pass 0 fail (1 dropout for personal reasons)
# What is your email address?
 
# What is your eLinux wiki username?
 
# What is your IRC nickname?
 
# What is the name of your School and in what country?
 
# What is your primary language? (We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.)
 
# Where are you located, and what hours do you tend to work? (We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.)
 
# Have you participated in an open-source project before? If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects, or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in open-source. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer?
 
  
About your project
+
===If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?===
 +
N/A – BeagleBoard.org has applied and participated in the past.
  
# What is the name of your project?
+
===What Open Source Initiative approved license(s) does your project use?===
# Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? For whom are you making it, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?
+
GPLv2 - http://opensource.org/licenses/GPL-2.0
# What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is about 11 weeks long; tell us what you will be working on each week.
 
# Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences, credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant. Provide references such as professors who know your work if you like. Please feel free to visit our IRC channel, #beagle on irc.freenode.net, and ask for help.
 
  
You and the community
+
===What is the URL for your ideas page?===
 +
http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard/GSoC/Ideas
  
# If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the BeagleBoard.org community? Consider who will use it and how it will save them effort. Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be answers received from feedback of members of the BeagleBoard.org community, at least one of whom should be a BeagleBoard.org GSoC mentor. Provide email contact information for non-GSoC mentors.
+
===What is the main development mailing list for your organization?===
# What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around?
+
: http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard: All things BeagleBoard
 +
: http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard-gsoc: GSoC-specific things for BeagleBoard.org
  
Miscellaneous
+
===What is the main IRC channel for your organization?===
 
+
irc.freeenode.net #beagle
# Please submit to the beagleboard-gsoc mailing list a statically-linked ARM Linux "hello world" style executable that prints out your name and the date. Please keep it under 1MB. Provide a link here to that executable as archived on the mailing list and provide any instructions required for invoking it. You are welcome to test it on an ARM QEMU environment. Please feel free to visit our IRC channel, #beagle on irc.freenode.net, and ask for help.
 
# Is there anything else we should have asked you?
 
 
 
===What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible===
 
Mentors were chosen based on personal knowledge of their contributions over IRC helping community members, the mailing list, and specific projects of interest.
 
 
 
===What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?===
 
We will set the expectation that students will not be out of communication for more than 60 hours (ie, the length of a weekend) without prior notification to their mentor. We'll also hold mandatory weekly meetings in IRC for all the students to report on progress made, problems encountered, and proposed next steps.
 
 
 
All mentors are expected to review the SoC wiki and review the best practice sections. The project administrators will monitor all the projects and try to identify issues that might lead to disappearing contributors before the problem becomes unsolvable. (This applies to the next few answers also)
 
 
 
===What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?===
 
TI-based mentors will have work-oriented commitments.  We will choose non-TI-based mentors with a history of being involved in BeagleBoard.org projects and who are consistently responsive via IRC and e-mail. We plan to have secondary (paired mentors) and tertiary (general IRC channel) support for each project, and mentors will also be expected to attend the weekly check-in meetings on IRC. We will have a named contact in the same region and/or company as any mentor to assist in "pinging" any AWOL mentor.
 
 
 
===What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?===
 
We encourage candidates to interact with community members on the IRC channel and mailing list ahead of the program to gather information required for their application. We will work with the students to produce YouTube videos to introduce their projects to the community. Weekly blog post updates put into the community general RSS feed during and after the program help keep the community informed.  Students are encouraged to hang out on #beagle which is active roughly 24/7 during the program and we continue to see students remain from last year.  We will give them hardware and swag following the program to keep them interested.
 
 
 
===If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here.===
 
 
 
===If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here:===
 
 
 
===Anything else you'd like to tell us?===
 
 
 
===Backup Admin (Link ID)===
 
: Cathy Wicks <wicks.cathy  @no spam gmail.com>
 
 
 
==Old questions==
 
 
 
===What criteria do you use to select the members of your group? Please be as specific as possible.===
 
Membership in the BeagleBoard.org community is open to all interested parties. Since this community is based on a common interest in a particular piece of hardware, there are no specific requirements for membership. Many community members are also members of specific open source projects, such as OpenEmbedded and GNU Radio. Other community members use and enhance existing open source software to develop innovative mobile applications using the Beagle Board.
 
  
===What license(s) does your project use?===
+
===Who will be your backup organization administrator?===
For code written for this project, we will use GPLv2. When the project is based on an existing open source package, the license of that package will be used.
+
Cathy Wicks (c-wicks@ti.com)
  
Existing code is primarily GPLv2 and all kernel code should be so. Some developers use other FOSS licenses, such as MIT, LGPL, etc. There are some TI codecs available for use on the platform that are provided under publicly-available binary-only licenses as well as other binary firmware builds distributed as part of the Linux kernel, but these are discouraged from being used as part of any student project.
+
===What criteria did you use to select the mentors? Please be as specific as possible.===
 +
Mentors were chosen based on personal knowledge of their contributions over IRC helping community members, the mailing list, and specific projects of interest. With the BeagleBoard.org community existing now for 5 years, many of the same members are still very active and well-known to our GSoC administrators. We typically meet up at Embedded Linux Conference, Design West, Linaro meetings and several other small events. Given frequent support over IRC, it is clear which proposed mentors are the best candidates.
  
===What steps will you take to encourage contributors to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?===
+
===What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? Please be as specific as possible.===
 +
We will set the expectation that students should not be out of communication for more than 60 hours (i.e., the length of a weekend) without prior notification to their mentor. We'll also hold mandatory weekly meetings in IRC for all the students to report on progress made, problems encountered, and proposed next steps.
  
We understand that it is difficult for new people to start using the existing project mailing lists and irc channel, so we will create a specific Summer of Code email list and irc channel. Potential mentors will use these paths to work with students to develop ideas and project proposals. In at least one case, potential mentors have an existing relationship with some students, they will work directly with this group to prepare proposals. We understand that the preferred communication channels are the BeagleBoard.org lists and irc channel, during the Community Bonding Period we will introduce students to the these communication channels.
+
All mentors are expected to review the GSoC wiki and review the best practice sections. The project administrators will monitor all the projects and try to identify issues that might lead to disappearing contributors before the problem becomes unsolvable. (This applies to the next few answers, as well).
  
During the Community Bonding Period we will supply students with Beagle Boards and help them setup development environments.
+
===What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? Please be as specific as possible.===
 +
We will choose mentors with a history of being involved in BeagleBoard.org projects and who are consistently responsive via IRC and e-mail. In the past and we plan to continue to have, in addition to the primary mentor, 2 secondary mentors who can step in, though we've never had a disappearing mentor. We've found the secondary mentors also help greatly with improving student/mentor communication. Mentors are expected to attend the weekly check-in meetings on IRC. We will have a named contact in the same region and/or company as any mentor to assist in "pinging" any AWOL mentor.
  
Once we have accepted proposals, we will continue to use these resources, and develop additional communication paths as required.
+
===What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program?===
 +
We encourage candidates to interact with community members on the IRC channel and mailing list ahead of the program to gather information required for their application. We will work with the students to produce YouTube videos to introduce their projects to the community. Weekly blog post updates put into the community general RSS feed during and after the program help keep the community informed. Students are encouraged to hang out on #beagle, which is active roughly 24/7, during the program and we continue to see students remain from last year.
  
After the project, we plan to support students with successful projects in any wrap up work needed, such as submitting code to the upstream project.
+
===What will you do to encourage your accepted students to stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?===
 +
Many of our students are currently active in editing our ideas page and recruiting new Google Summer of Code students. We will give them hardware and “swag” following the program to keep them interested, but mostly we value their contributions and try to make sure that others in the community are exposed to those contributions. The greatest reward of producing quality code is having people use it and the world knowing you created it!
  
===What will you do to ensure that your accepted contributors stick with the project after GSoC concludes?===
+
===Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.===
 +
BeagleBoard.org is not a new organization to Google Summer of Code.
  
Although we will start by using SoC specific communication paths, all students will be expected to monitor the primary email list and irc channel. Over the course of the summer students will be encouraged to start using the primary communication channels to work on their project. By transitioning students to the primary communication channels, we hope to integrate students into the larger community prior to the end of the summer of code.
+
===Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here.===
 +
BeagleBoard.org has not been approached by other organizations to vouch for them at this time.
  
===Link ID===
+
===What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?===
BeagleBoard
+
Although we will start by using GSoC-specific communication paths, all students will be expected to monitor the primary email list and IRC channel. Over the course of the summer students will be encouraged to start using the primary communication channels to work on their project. By transitioning students to the primary communication channels, we hope to integrate students into the larger community before the end of summer of code so that they can continue to work on their projects via our IRC channel after GSoC concludes.
  
===Public Email===
+
Each student is asked to create a public blog for updating the community and logging their progress on the project. Blogs receive hits from around the world and people ask questions via the comments sections. This keeps the students engaged with the community and their previous work.
beagleboard@googlegroups.com
 

Revision as of 18:11, 13 February 2014


Contents

How does a mentoring organization apply?

The organization should choose a single administrator to submit its application via the Google Summer of Code 2014 site between February 3 - February 14 2014.

Jason Kridner will be the administrator, but is looking for volunteers to help edit the application contents and to update the ideas.

What should a mentoring organization application look like?

Organization Name

BeagleBoard.org

Description

BeagleBoard.org is an open source community of experienced hackers, hobbyists and engineers who are enthusiastic about building powerful,open ARM-based systems based on the same processors used is in popular, high-end Android phones today. BeagleBoard.org’s vision is to improve access to small, low-power computing platforms that can be embedded into new creations using easy to use development tools, such as the web-based IDE. The hardware designs of all Beagle boards are open source with all schematics, bills-of-materials, layouts, etc. shared for building other devices. The software is also open source and is generated by the community(such as the Angstrom Distribution, Ubuntu, Android and other Linux distributions). Compiler tools are free and the board is available at a low cost. Boards will be provided for free to any student participating in a BeagleBoard.org-related GSoC project.

Texas Instruments sponsors a number of BeagleBoard.org-related activities and the first members of the community were TI employees, however, the collaboration base is now stronger than ever with over 5,000 members on the mailing list, over 100,000 individual developers worldwide who have purchased Beagle hardware and over 150 developers who actively participate on the live chat (IRC channel) at any given time. Existing projects are often for the purpose of building robots, autonomous flying drones, automotive entertainment and navigation systems, home media centers, digital signs, wearable computers, gaming consoles and even 3d printers! (over 380 projects registered at http://beagleboard.org/project/) Existing software compatibility includes various versions of Android, Ubuntu, Angstrom, Gentoo, FFmpeg, XBMC, ROS, OpenCV and much more.

Home page

http://beagleboard.org/

Main Organization License

GPLv2

Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2014? What do you hope to gain by participating?

By participating in GSoC 2014, we hope to inspire open source developers interested in physical computing, especially when it involves high-level operating systems and heterogeneous processor environments. In doing so, developers will be enabled to apply the core components running on BeagleBoard to more environments and with new environmental interactions.

We hope to increase general interest in computers and electronics through improved access, simplified interfaces and example projects.

Because the Beagle platform is open source hardware, any software designed on it can be taken and put into entirely new products. Because we focus most of our support on Linux, we enable software developed in our projects to be easily used in other systems.

Has your organization participated in past Google Summer of Codes?

Yes.

How many potential mentors do you have for this year's program? What criteria did you use to select them?

We currently have 20 potential mentors for this year's program of which only 4 haven't previously mentored in GSoC. We've removed mentors from previous years who were under motivated to help students succeed and brought on mentors who have contributed significantly to our projects or related projects either through documentation or implementation. Most of our potential mentors are also in frequent contact with each other through IRC, Google+ and our primary developer mailing list to have confidence they can work together well.

If you answered “yes” to the question above please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.

BeagleBoard.org GSoC students have:

  • improved the Linux kernel support for analog-to-digital converters, software-based pulse width modulators and USB bus analysis,
  • implemented network protocols for booting a remote processor from Android, Linux or Windows hosts,
  • implemented Arduino-compatible software on top of Linux (code used by other hardware platforms, eg. Intel Galileo),
  • improved the functionality of Minix for operating system education,
  • improved the integration and performance on ARM or DSP processors of ROS, XBMC, FFTW and OpenCV,
  • and delivered a framework for compilation and invocation of heterogeneous processor functions.

We had an excellent set of mentors with 3 mentors for every student to ensure high availability of mentor time via the IRC channel. Our mentors had deep knowledge relevant to the projects and were able to assist the students in each of their technical challenges. We monitored student progress with weekly blog posts and IRC meetings to keep them on track and resolve any blocking issues. We collected short video presentations introducing each project, giving observers a good idea of the students' goals. We screened out projects that wouldn't provide sufficiently reusable software for the rest of the community.

Including a hardware component adds some challenges when shipping around the world. We learned from our participation in 2010 that we could use local businesses to help improve our worldwide shipping to get hardware to the students on-time (though we also found that more students already had hardware). In general, getting hardware to students is one of the more onerous challenges we have, but we've eliminated it as a road block.

Getting more face-to-face interaction continues to be a challenge, but our IRC interactions are strong and we've started to incorporate Google Hangouts in our collaboration.

We've greatly improved our success rate in getting code adopted by the upstream projects and made available across the BeagleBoard community by making integration into a distribution will be a requirement, giving greater emphasis on following up with upstream developers and focusing on projects directly impacting the BeagleBoard community, rather than relying on upstream projects that might not be fundamentally motivated to adopt the patches.

Pass/fail rate for 2010: 6 pass 0 fail

Pass/fail rate for 2013: 6 pass 0 fail (1 dropout for personal reasons)

If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

N/A – BeagleBoard.org has applied and participated in the past.

What Open Source Initiative approved license(s) does your project use?

GPLv2 - http://opensource.org/licenses/GPL-2.0

What is the URL for your ideas page?

http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard/GSoC/Ideas

What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard: All things BeagleBoard
http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard-gsoc: GSoC-specific things for BeagleBoard.org

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

irc.freeenode.net #beagle

Who will be your backup organization administrator?

Cathy Wicks (c-wicks@ti.com)

What criteria did you use to select the mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

Mentors were chosen based on personal knowledge of their contributions over IRC helping community members, the mailing list, and specific projects of interest. With the BeagleBoard.org community existing now for 5 years, many of the same members are still very active and well-known to our GSoC administrators. We typically meet up at Embedded Linux Conference, Design West, Linaro meetings and several other small events. Given frequent support over IRC, it is clear which proposed mentors are the best candidates.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? Please be as specific as possible.

We will set the expectation that students should not be out of communication for more than 60 hours (i.e., the length of a weekend) without prior notification to their mentor. We'll also hold mandatory weekly meetings in IRC for all the students to report on progress made, problems encountered, and proposed next steps.

All mentors are expected to review the GSoC wiki and review the best practice sections. The project administrators will monitor all the projects and try to identify issues that might lead to disappearing contributors before the problem becomes unsolvable. (This applies to the next few answers, as well).

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

We will choose mentors with a history of being involved in BeagleBoard.org projects and who are consistently responsive via IRC and e-mail. In the past and we plan to continue to have, in addition to the primary mentor, 2 secondary mentors who can step in, though we've never had a disappearing mentor. We've found the secondary mentors also help greatly with improving student/mentor communication. Mentors are expected to attend the weekly check-in meetings on IRC. We will have a named contact in the same region and/or company as any mentor to assist in "pinging" any AWOL mentor.

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

We encourage candidates to interact with community members on the IRC channel and mailing list ahead of the program to gather information required for their application. We will work with the students to produce YouTube videos to introduce their projects to the community. Weekly blog post updates put into the community general RSS feed during and after the program help keep the community informed. Students are encouraged to hang out on #beagle, which is active roughly 24/7, during the program and we continue to see students remain from last year.

What will you do to encourage your accepted students to stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

Many of our students are currently active in editing our ideas page and recruiting new Google Summer of Code students. We will give them hardware and “swag” following the program to keep them interested, but mostly we value their contributions and try to make sure that others in the community are exposed to those contributions. The greatest reward of producing quality code is having people use it and the world knowing you created it!

Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.

BeagleBoard.org is not a new organization to Google Summer of Code.

Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here.

BeagleBoard.org has not been approached by other organizations to vouch for them at this time.

What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

Although we will start by using GSoC-specific communication paths, all students will be expected to monitor the primary email list and IRC channel. Over the course of the summer students will be encouraged to start using the primary communication channels to work on their project. By transitioning students to the primary communication channels, we hope to integrate students into the larger community before the end of summer of code so that they can continue to work on their projects via our IRC channel after GSoC concludes.

Each student is asked to create a public blog for updating the community and logging their progress on the project. Blogs receive hits from around the world and people ask questions via the comments sections. This keeps the students engaged with the community and their previous work.