Organization Application Form 2012
- Organization ID
- Organization name
- Description
- Home Page
- Main Organization License
- Backup Admin (Link ID)
- What is the URL for your ideas page?
- What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
- What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
- Why is your organization applying to participate? What do you hope to gain by participating?
- Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
- If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
- Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
- What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible
- What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
- What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
- What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
- Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.
- 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.
Organization ID
xwiki
Organization name
XWiki
Description
XWiki is an open source software development platform based on the wiki principles, under the LGPL license. In addition to being a full-featured wiki, it is also a second generation wiki allowing effortless development of collaborative web applications. On top of this platform a plethora of applications are developed, targeted mainly on aiding enterprise-level needs.
XWiki has a vibrant community of developers and users, consisting of individual users as well as organizations around the world that are using XWiki for their own Communities and Intranets.
Within XWiki, the development involves several levels: serverside platform programming in Java with Servlet technologies, serverside application development in Velocity, Groovy, CSS and HTML, RIA development in GWT, and clientside development in JavaScript.
We propose projects that cover serverside Servlet programming, rich application development on the clientside, usability and performance improvements.
Home Page
Main Organization License
LGPL
Backup Admin (Link ID)
sdumitriu
What is the URL for your ideas page?
What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
#xwiki on irc.freenode.net
What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
Why is your organization applying to participate? What do you hope to gain by participating?
Each year SoC has been a great help for our projects, by providing not just a few developers during the summer, but also by increasing the number of permanent contributors.
The GSoC allows us to propose some fun projects around the XWiki platform which are self-containing and which (if successful) can then be incorporated into XWiki's development branch. In addition, it's nice to think that we'll help students discover open source and professional development practices.
We had a great time participating in the previous Summer of Code editions, which allowed us to meet great people, both students and other mentors. Like in previous GSoC editions, we hope to keep some of the students as permanent contributors. We enjoy very much working with talented students and we wish to help them discover open source development.
Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
We have been accepted in 6 out of 7 editions of GSoC so far. Every Summer of Code has had an amazing impact on XWiki. We learned from the first year in particular to distinguish greedy students versus passionate students. We also learned how students can overestimate their capacities. We also learned the work we need to do to mentor the students. Year by year we feel that we do a better job at introducing the students to high quality development practices and communication in an Open Source project.
The GSoC projects have created great additions to the XWiki software as well as brought stable contributors to the XWiki projects. Some of the most notable contributions are: a complete makeover of XWiki's UI, standard compliant backend storage for XWiki, a Chart Macro to transform tables to charts, an experimental peer-to-peer library allowing to replicate wikis, Google Docs integration, a better testing framework, and others. One SoC 2007 project even evolved into a fully featured XWiki product, namely the XEclipse offline editor of wiki pages, which continues to be a star of GSoC each year. 2008 was the year with the largest number of projects and successes. It brought 3 permanent contributors, and all the projects that have passed the final evaluation have been successfully integrated: syntax highlighting and code completion for XEclipse, Open Office integration providing import for office documents and a much better copy/paste support in our WYSIWYG editor than what any other editor offers, WebDAV and REST access to the wiki, a better user experience in XWiki Watch, SSO through OpenID. GSoC 2009 was an occasion for fresh ideas, bringing new features to some of our existing projects (XEclipse and XOffice), and laying the foundation for some exciting and rather complex new ones: XOO - an OpenOffice Plugin for editing Wiki pages, OpenSocial integration with XWiki, Wiki Import Module, which started out very promising. In particular, the work done on the OpenSocial integration project was the starting point for XWiki 3.0's new Dashboard. Finally, GSoC 2011 branched out towards the Android platform with a comprehensive library which allows Android applications to communicate with a remote XWiki instance, revitalized XEclipse with the "RESTification" project and brought it up to date with XWiki's latest features, and prototyped an auto completion feature which speeds up content editing.
GSoC 2011 was the our first year with a 100% success ratio, but not all our previous GSoC experiences were the same. Even though the students we have chosen showed enthusiasm and willingness, some are not, in the end, capable to produce code that can be integrable in our code base. However, for those students who make efforts to do a good job until the end, the failure is not a complete failure, as they still earn experience, expand their knowledge and improve their communication skills.
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
Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
http://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/GoogleSummerOfCode/student+application+form
What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible
- Desire to be a mentor
- Knowledge of the code base and development best practices
- Availability to mentor the students
- General view of the XWiki goals and roadmap
- Mentoring skills and past experience in mentoring people and especially GSoC students
- Tolerant but firm in what they expect
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
We plan to screen students based on their available time and technical capability to achieve the goal. Our past experience with Summer of Code projects is that students must not be overloaded with other work to be able to focus on the Summer of Code project. In our previous projects we had two disappearing student who had overestimated their capabilities and available time.
To reduce the risk we will ask the student to stay in Instant Messaging contact with his mentor in order to give regular updates, and to regularly discuss their work on the main mailing list. We will also ask the student to quickly show results (code, specifications) to be able to judge his understanding.
If we feel this isn't done we are able to invalidate the student at the mid-term evaluation.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
We expect that this will not happen since our mentor are active people in the community and wouldn't do it if they didn't feel they could. In any case we are able to activate one of our backup mentors. Even more, we don't encourage a private student-mentor relationship. We prefer that students and mentors discuss their projects in the open on our dev mailing list and IRC channel, and we try to get the student to work with the whole community, where the mentor is just the person who knows the most about that project.
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
Outside GSoC we're always maintaining a friendly community on our mailing lists, gently encouraging people to contribute.
Our IRC channel and mailing lists are very active, and at almost any time of the day and night there's a dev available to talk to interested students (people in general). The community is very responsive and patient with new people who are in need of some help, or simply curious and willing to learn something new.
During the project we will ask the student to participate in the developers mailing list to explain what they are working on and will try to have as much communication as possible done in public so that our community knows what is happening. If the student interacts with the core he will be trained by the community to comply with the community rules. We're trying to make the students develop code that can be integrated on the spot, and not some sandboxed projects that might one day be used or not.
We believe that this intensive interaction with the community is likely to increase the student's motivation to stick with the project.
After the project we will of course invite the student to continue work in our community if the project was successful.
Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.
N/A
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.
N/A
