GSOC2010_Application
Submitted Fri Mar 12 18:58:29 UTC 2010
Changes can be made until Friday, 12. March 2010 11:00PM
mapnik
Mapnik
Mapnik is a cross-platform mapping toolkit focused on making beautiful maps. It is the rendering engine behind sites like OpenStreetMap.org, Everyblock.org, Cloudmade.com, and Kosmosnimki.ru, and powers emerging tools for the web like MapBox.com, TileDrawer.com, and MapOSMatic.org.
LGPLv2
Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating? (required)
The Mapnik project seeks to advance the role of beautiful cartography and advanced visualization on the web by growing the community of developers capabable of contributing to the Mapnik rendering engine. We want to see the graphics problems inherent in using and displaying complex datasets become easier solve through Mapnik, by adding support for things like better multi-resolution printing and scaling, sophisticated compositing of layers, and the ability to to visualize the logic inside the Mapnik engine in graphical front-ends. Also we want to further the possibilities and examples of using Mapnik with other projects like QGIS, Cairo, Django, and think that many of the potential projects we have in mind could further cross-collaboration with other prominent mentor organizations like OSGEO.
Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
No, this is our first year!
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.
Not applicable.
Not applicable.
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 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. (required)
mapnik-devel - http://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/mapnik-devel
#mapnik on the irc.freenode.net.
Name:
Country:
School and degree:
Email:
Phone:
Title:
Describe your idea
Explain how your SoC task would benefit the the Mapnik community and what other projects might benefit directly or by example:
Please provide details of previous experience with C++, python:
Please provide details of previous experience with the Antigrain Geometry Library, Cairo, or Boost:
Please provide details of previous experience with mapping or GIS:
Please tell us why you are interested in GIS and open source software:
Please tell us why you are interested in your specific coding project:
Do you understand this is a serious commitment, equivalent to a full-time paid summer internship or summer job?
What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible
Since this is our first year applying we have no formal criteria for Mentors. Mentors are self-nominated by their offering of project ideas and commitment to mentor by listing an idea on the Mapnik GSOC ideas page. All mentors that have proposed projects ideas so far are active contributers to the Mapnik community and the project administrator, Dane Springmeyer, is supportive of their involvement and capability of helping provide guidance to students.
We will ensure that any students accepted provide all their important contact information and the program administrator and mentors be in frequent contact with them to ensure that the level of committment needed to work on Mapnik successfully is clear to all students.
We will also clearly state our reporting goals, which includes tracking their progress in Mapnik Trac "milestones", active involvement in #mapnik irc with questions, weekly progress reports to the mapnik-devel mailing list, and ideally blog postings detailing their ideas and highlights.
We plan to have at least 1-2 backup mentors, that are very knowlegable about the Mapnik internals and can help answer questions if the primarily mentor is out of touch for travel or sickness.
We also plan to support projects that encourage cross-collaboration with OSGEO SOC projects, and we anticipate that if we are accepted there will be potential duel-mentoring possibilities within OSGEO projects.
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your community before, during, and after the program? (required)
Weekly reports to the mapnik-devel mailing list, collaboration encouraged on #mapnik irc, and blogging about highlights or problems encountered.
We also will encourage students to keep their code in a public and easily visible branch of Mapnik svn (or git-svn) (or mirrored if they use the GSOC repository), so that all work can be previewed and supported by the wide Mapnik community that follows tickets and commits via RSS and IRC.
What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes? (required)
Positive feedback is an essential ingredient to keeping students involved and having them turn into longer term developers and maintainers. Mapnik has great potential, as a young and enthusiastic project, to help students feel valued and encouraged. Also mentors and the project administrator are commited to spreading the word about good student work to the other projects that depend on Mapnik software.
Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team? (required)
It is a great honor to be able to apply and thanks for the inspiring work you do to support Open Source development.
Backup administrators:
- Artem Pavlenko (melange: artemp)