Privly GSOC 2015 Application
privly
The Privly Foundation
The founding purpose of The Privly Foundation is to empower the Privly community to participate in and contribute to privacy software projects by fostering awareness of privacy issues and building a community of mutual support around Privly development. The Privly Foundation was founded following a successful crowdfunding round in 2012. You can find more details on Privly at the following locations:
Privly Consumer Site: https://priv.ly/
The Privly Foundation Community Site: http://privly.org
Privly GitHub wiki: https://github.com/privly/privly-organization/wiki
privacy, security, browser extensions, javascript, cryptography, native client, c++
MIT License
https://github.com/privly/privly-organization/blob/master/graphics/logos/logo_large_bleed.png
https://github.com/privly/privly-organization/wiki/Ideas
http://groups.google.com/group/privly
irc://irc.freenode.net/privly
https://plus.google.com/116408437159289879477/posts
https://www.facebook.com/shareprivately
Checked
Shivam Verma
Why is your organization applying to participate in the Google Summer of Code 2015? What do you hope to gain by participating?
After a successful GSoC last year, we are excited to welcome new students into the organization this year. We are applying to participate because the GSoC is a great way to increase Privly's developer base while providing newcomers with a welcoming project. Additionally, part of the Privly Foundation's public purpose as a tax-exempt organization is to educate the public on electronic privacy. The benefits of educating new developers on privacy-preserving development practices will be manifest for an entire career.
How many potential mentors do you have for this year's program? What criteria did you use to select them?
We are recruiting experienced Privly contributors - both developers and domain experts, to serve as mentors this year. We will assign two mentors to every project - a primary technical mentor (an experienced Privly developer) and a backup who may be a domain expert or another technical resource - which helps balance the time commitment required to be able to effectively contribute. We expect to have 4 mentors this summer, each of which will act as lead mentor to at most one student.
We have been learning from Sahana, a previously successful GSoC mentoring organization. We share a board member with Sahana, and their insight helped Privly be a successful mentoring organization. Since it is best not to invent new control procedures, we are using much or Sahana's Creative Commons licensed GSoC material.
We will be sure to document the expectations for the students prior to their involvement in GSoC. We will require that students check in with us via IRC/email/mailing list at least once per week. Therefore, we should know early on if we are losing touch with them, or if they need more guidance and help. Our sincere goal is to prevent student disappearance by keeping contact with them regularly, and providing welcoming, helpful guidance to help students catch up with their work.
In the event that we do not hear from students, we will email them personally to re-engage them. If we don't hear from the student for 7 days, we will send them a warning of their failure to meet our requirements for participation in GSoC. In the event that our interventions fail to bring the students back to active status, we will look to the GSoC program office for guidance.
One of our main mentors is the lead developer of Privly. He is also a board member. It is highly unlikely that he will disappear. Our other two technical mentors are committed Privly developers. Additionally, both students from our 2013 GSoC are eager to help mentor projects this summer. If we on-board any new mentors, we will ensure that they are aware of our expectations prior to mentoring. Furthermore, each project/student will have two mentors (a main mentor to provide technical advice and on-boarding help, and a backup mentor to provide domain specific advice). This will ensure some amount of redundancy.
Along with weekly updates from students, we will require weekly updates from mentors. Similar to students, we will be able to detect any lack of participation at an early stage. Each of our mentors has a passion for the project, and for helping students succeed. In the event that we do not hear from mentors, the lead developer and backup org admin will ensure that the students are supported through the duration of GSoC. If need be, we will on-board new mentors and allow for our other board members to have a more central role in mentoring.
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program?
To promote our GSoC program, we will post to our three mailing lists, English and German language Twitter accounts, Facebook and Google+ pages, and ask several affiliated projects whether we may post to their mailing list. Before GSoC, we ask that students submit a bug report to Privly and to work through the appropriate "levels" of the development guide. We will work them to find a bug, and learn how their existing skills could be applied to our project.
During GSoC, we will keep in touch with the students via IRC/mailing list/emails. We will require one weekly formal update from the students, but we expect to have much more frequent interaction with them. Many of our developers idle on IRC, so we are in almost constant contact with those who are on the IRC channel.
Currently with Privly, we block out weekly work-sessions, where developers (mentors) give their full and undivided attention to working on Privly, answering questions, and planning for the next week. We plan to continue this routine during GSoC. The students can join us during this work session via IRC.
What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?
We will continue to invite the students to our weekly Privly work-sessions. Also, our projects should be feasible to complete in the summer, but they are part of a larger component. They will be able to apply the skills they learned during GSoC to continue work after the summer. As an organization welcoming to newcomers, we hope to encourage continuing participation, and for previous GSoC-ers to become mentors for GSoC-ers in years to come.
Ultimately we hope to transition GSoC students to maintainer roles, which is currently true for two out of the seven students we have mentored and may soon be the case for a third student.
Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.
[confidential]
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.
[confidential]
If you chose "veteran" in the dropdown above, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.
[confidential]
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Credit: This Google Summer of Code content is licensed under the CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license furnished by the Sahana Software Foundation.