GSoC 2016 Application

This page is the GSoC organization application for coala. If you're looking towards applying for a GSoC at coala please look at https://github.com/coala/coala/wiki/Project-Ideas !

Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code?

coala wants to achieve two goals by participating in the Google Summer of Code:

1. Educating new students about open source and free software.

This has always been a major goal of the coala community. We are continuously improving our newcomer experience and are currently trying out a new concept to gamify the newcomer experience (newcomers can climb up issue levels and when they reach "very high" they are basically maintainers.) As such we have several developers that currently spend more time introducing newcomers than developing code.

2. Gaining more long term contributors.

How many potential mentors have agreed to mentor this year?

1-5 (selected)

How will you keep mentors engaged with their students?

1. coala has a strict review process. The mentor is required to fully review the contributions of his student and guide him until it's ready to be merged. Without the contribution merged the student cannot pass the GSoC.
2. We require mentors to hold weekly meetings with the students to check the progress.
3. Students will be made aware that at any point in time several of the administrators are available to deal with any mentor related problems they have.
4. The coala project is still at a size where a lot of communication happens centrally. It is possible for the student to engage to most relevant people of the community (almost all are mentors) and the other way round. This month, the coala maintainers have collaboratively and as a team mentored more than ten students (and counting) with extensive care and time effort for the IndiaHacks hackathon, not counting GSoC only applicants and regular contributors.

How will you help your students stay on schedule to complete their projects?

1. No project will be accepted until the student has submitted a proper contribution. This is important as students are definitely aware of our review process and of what all is needed in order to get a contribution accepted. Thus, ugly surprises on mentor or student side can be avoided.
2. Weekly mentor/student meetings will be hold to check the progress regularly and deal with problems early.
3. We advise students to set several milestones to their project. If unforeseen problems occur, the mentor can evaluate if a change of the schedule is rectified. If this is the case the plan can be changed accordingly and due to the milestones a meaningful contribution can be done.
4. The students blogs are aggregated on http://planet.coala-analyzer.org/ so their progress is visible publicly. Blog posts are required every two weeks as this has proven to be useful for GNOME.

How will you get your students involved in your community during GSoC?

1. Most conversations happen in the community wide gitter channel. Students get a warm welcome and are immediately included. (That has already begun with several students who expressed interest in doing a GSoC with coala and they seem to love it.)
2. Students will be invited to a conference during GSoC (for example GUADEC) to present their awesome work. This is awesome for both parties and in our experience highly increases the motivation and fun.
3. Biweekly blog posts are required and aggregated.
4. All contributions will be automatically and immediately released as development versions which leads to high motivation.
5. The coala team tweets about great achievements from any contributor regularly at https://twitter.com/coala_analyzer .

How will you keep students involved with your community after GSoC?

1. The students blogs are continued to be aggregated on http://planet.coala-analyzer.org/ . Great achievements will always be shown publically.
2. Mentors and students are encouraged to continue working together.
3. Students are encouraged and if possible funded to visit conferences to represent coala (we actually have this case right now with a few GSoC students which have funding - thanks to Google)
4. coala provides several research relevant topics. The coala community has worked together with universities in the past and supports students writing a coala related thesis through code reviews and other assistance. See https://github.com/coala-analyzer/coala/wiki/Writing-a-Thesis-with-coala#benefits for more information.

Has your org been accepted as a mentoring org in Google Summer of Code before?

No (selected)

If your org has applied for GSoC before but not been accepted, select the years:

None selected.

If you are a new organization to GSoC, is there a Google employee or previously participating organization who will vouch for you? If so, please enter their name, contact email, and relationship to your organization. (optional)

Alexandre Franke afranke@gnome.org, current GSoC administrator for GNOME and GSoC administrator together with our current GSoC administrator (Lasse Schuirmann) for GNOME last year.

Are you part of a foundation/umbrella organization?

No (selected)

What year was your project started?

2013

Anything else we should know (optional)?

Although coala is not directly part of GNOME we participated under their umbrella last year. We successfully mentored two students. Both completed their projects and both are developers of coala and maintainers of sub-projects now. This was a great experience for all of us and although we aware of the time proper mentoring takes we are excited about and committed to it. As the project grows up, it is important for us to get independent from GNOME and not be restricted to GNOME related projects.