Google Summer of Code 2011 application

Our organization application is here on the Gentoo wiki, in hopes that we can work together to improve it over the next week. Applications are due at 3pm Pacific time on March 11, and earlier is better.

Description
We produce Gentoo Linux, a special flavor of Linux that can be automatically optimized and customized for just about any application or need. Extreme performance, configurability and a top-notch user and developer community are all hallmarks of the Gentoo experience.

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?
We intend to end the summer with new, enthusiastic, experienced, high-quality Gentoo developers.

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
We've done very well over the past 5 years, but we aim to make significant improvements to our GSoC program every year because we believe there's always room to get better.

Gentoo has an excellent track record for project success. Last year we did a great job despite a huge growth in the size of our program, with 16 of our 19 students succeeding. Thanks in part to our new recruitment strategy, 11 of those students chose to join Gentoo as full-fledged developers, and 2 others are interested in doing the same. We're very excited about this recruitment rate of 70%–80% and look forward to improving it even more this year.

Over the history of Gentoo's involvement in the Summer of Code, we have a 57% success rate in passing students becoming developers at some point and a 77% success rate in passing students becoming long-term community members, both of which we continually increase.

One of our strongest suits is converting students to developers, but we aren't always as successful integrating and deploying their code — particularly for standalone projects. The biggest changes planned for our program this year aim to address this problem by requiring more agile methods and working more closely with our infrastructure team. For example, we plan to make servers available for students to push running implementations of "hello world" web services starting on day 1 to ensure deployment is never a limiting factor. Additionally, we will bring our infra team in during the planning and evaluation stage to ensure that they'll support all proposed technology.

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.
2006: 10/14

2007: 8/9

2008: 5/6

2009: 6/7

2010: 16/19

What is the URL for your ideas page?
http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2011_ideas

== 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 2011. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. ==

For all GSoC-related discussion, start at gentoo-soc@lists.gentoo.org.

Our main development list is gentoo-dev@lists.gentoo.org.

Subscription information is at .

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
For all GSoC-related discussion, start at irc.freenode.net/#gentoo-soc.

We also have a moderated development channel at irc.freenode.net/#gentoo-dev. You will need to request temporary "voice" privileges to speak there; if you're accepted, we will permanently "voice" you.

== Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2011 site. == Congratulations on applying for a project with Gentoo! To improve your chances of succeeding with this project, we want to make sure you're sufficiently prepared to invest a full summer's worth of time on it. In addition to the usual application, there are 2 specific actions and 1 piece of info we would like to see from you:


 * Use the tools that you will use in your project to make changes to code (e.g., source code management [SCM] software such as CVS, Subversion, or git). Please use the same SCM as you will use for your project to check out one of our repositories (more repositories), make a change to it that fixes a bug, and post that change as a patch on a mailing list or bug. Please fix a real bug reported in Bugzilla to show that you can use the tools to make a meaningful change; your mentor can help you identify a good one. Your contact in Gentoo can help you determine which SCM and repository you should use for this. If your idea doesn't have a contact, please get in touch with us on the gentoo-soc mailing list or in real-time on IRC at Freenode/#gentoo-soc. Once you've made your change, link to it from your application.
 * Participate in our development community. Please make a post to one of our mailing lists and link to it from your application (archives.gentoo.org holds past postings). The gentoo-soc list would be a good starting point, if you aren't subscribed to any others already. The best posts would be an introduction of the project you're applying for and a little background about you, to introduce yourself to the community and get some broader input about your project.
 * Give us your contact info. Please provide your email address, home mailing address, and phone number. This is a requirement and provides for accountability on both your side and ours.

These actions are things you will do extremely commonly as an open-source developer, and they really aren't that hard, so don't let them hold you back! The remainder of this application section is free-form. Please read our application guidelines and Google's FAQ to complete it. Good luck!

What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible:
Project-specific mentors will be selected if they are known as the authority on that project in Gentoo in addition to having the attributes in our mentoring guide. Senior overseeing mentors with previous mentoring experience will also be attached to teach project mentors.

To ensure that mentors can do a great job, we need to also have high-quality project administrators. Admins must have past mentoring experience, and at least one admin must have past experience doing so. This year, both admins will have previous GSoC admin experience. I (Donnie Berkholz) was admin for the past 2 years and our 2008 admin, Alec Warner (Google), will be backup admin.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
If a scheduled meeting is missed, we will begin daily attempts to reach them through multiple forms of communication. We will require a physical address and phone number, and we will confirm the phone number at the start of the program. If we cannot reach them successfully via these methods, Gentoo's community is large, so we will attempt to have someone near them geographically get in touch. If we cannot get in touch for 1 week without any advance notice from the student, they will be sent a final warning. If we hear nothing by the following day, they will be failed. Students will be informed of this policy when the program starts and will agree to follow it.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
We have available backup mentors so that students will never be without mentorship, even if the original mentor disappears. We will pursue the same communication methods as with students, and failures will be dealt with by blocking them from any future mentoring.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
We will strongly encourage applicants to interact with the community using our standard communication methods (mailing lists and IRC) before and during the application & evaluation periods. In fact, this will be part of our custom application template. If they cannot learn to do it during that month-long period, we can't expect that they will learn to do so during the next few months. That will count against them in the ranking of their application. Since communication will be one of the requirements for a successful application, we expect that problems during and after the program will be much rarer.

We will treat students in the same way we treat other new members of our community, a significant portion of whom are college students just like the applicants. By encouraging students to communicate directly with the community instead of privately with their mentors, we will infuse them with the process of open-source development.

In the past, we've discovered that a major key to sticky contributors is close personal ties with the community. Requiring students to become full members of the development community instead of segregating them with their mentors as conduits to the community will naturally result in a higher stickiness.

Another technique that we discussed at the 2008 mentor summit was converting students into developers before the summer ends, to create a natural continuation instead of a break.

As my first year as admin in 2009, we proved these techniques work by increasing our new-developer ratio from 20% to 67% of passing students. In 2008, we had 20% become developers but 60% stay involved in the community. In 2009, we successfully converted the community members into developers instead of losing their potential contributions.

In my second year as admin in 2010, we grew the size of our program by more than 100% and proved that we could scale our successful methods up to a 19-student program by maintaining our 2009 recruitment rate of 67%! And we still haven't given up on the rest; 2 of the 5 others have expressed interest and are actively under recruitment.

== If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here: ==

Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team?
To spread the love, we've begun working to share our successful methods with other organizations by publicizing them in blogs, providing advice via IRC and email, etc. We also joined the gsoc-veterans list to mentor newer organizations, and we work with them on IRC too. Every year we learn more about what works, and we endeavor to spread that knowledge as widely as possible to maximize the benefit.

We've always been something of an umbrella organization because we contribute to diverse projects that benefit Gentoo, like NetworkManager, PackageKit, Dracut, Smolt, the BSDs, and more. This year, we've expanded our umbrella to also include derivative Linux distributions based on Gentoo, which provides them with a unique opportunity while building a community across the broader Gentoo ecosystem.

You all rock! Thanks so much for running a great program for the last few years; we've loved being a part of it.