GSoC:2007 Mentor Application

1. Describe your organization.

   • XMMS2 is the spiritual successor to the very successful XMMS project. The creators of XMMS got together in 2002 and spun out the XMMS2 sister project that is now lead by Tobias Rundström and Anders Gustafsson with around 10-15 regular contributors spread over the world (but concentrated in Europe). Our focus has been to separate music playback from the UI in order to provide multiple interfaces and other interesting features. While the code of the music playback engine is starting to mature we have also added features that are expected from modern music players, like a Media library and a powerful way of querying it (Collections).

2. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2007? What do you hope to gain by participating?

   • We hope to gain (besides beautiful code) more people involved in our project and more regular contributors. Our exposure in the program last year also gave our organization great PR that we hope to mimic this year.

3. Did your organization participate in GSoC 2005 or 2006? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects.

   • We participated for the first time 2006 and we feel that it was very successful and that we also learned a lot during the process. Last year we had two very successful projects, two semi-successful ones and one failure. I think with the experience from last year we can turn those two semi-successful projects into successes. More preparation and a better understanding of the project will give us an advantage this year. Furthermore, the one failure we experienced helped us reflect a bit on how we could improve our community and processes to provide a better experience to GSoC participants.

4. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

5. Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.

   • Tobias Rundström - xmmstru@gmail.com

6. What license does your project use?

   • The core of XMMS2 is LGPL and some plugins are GPL because they depend on libraries that are strict GPL. We prefer LGPL where possible.

7. What is the URL for your ideas page?

   • http://xmms2.org/wiki/Summer_of_Code_2007/Proposed_projects

8. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

   • http://lists.xmms2.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/xmms2-devel

9. What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

   • 1. xmms2 on freenode

10. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

    • TODO

11. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.

    • andersg@0x63.nu

12. Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account Information.

    • Tobias Rundström, xmmstru@gmail.com
    • Anders Gustafsson, andersg@0x63.nu
    • Alexander Botero-Lowry, alex.boterolowry@gmail.com
    • Sébastien Cevey, theefer/gmail

13. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

    • Anders and Tobias were selected because they are the project leaders and also because they were mentoring last year. Alexander and Sebastien was involved as students last year and are now regular contributors to XMMS2, they have probably the best understanding of what is needed.

14. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

    • Last year we did have a disappearing student. We realize now that there is no excuse for disappearing without explanation so we don't intend to show much mercy for people that disappear. Bonus-URL on the subject: http://foucault.info/documents/disciplineAndPunish/foucault.disciplineAndPunish.torture.en.html

15. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

    • Knowing the mentors very well, we don't expect this to happen. Should it happen I will personally track down the offender and slap him into talk-ative mode.

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

    • Hanging around on IRC will be a requirement, we will see non-IRCing as desertion. We will show our patented kindness and interest in the students work and persona. When we receive the SoC money for 2006 we probably will put a bit of that money into getting swag and bribe all students to stay with us this year.

17. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

    • See the above question.