Posts Tagged ‘mainstream engineering’

Students are flipping bits, not burgers.

Summer is under way and, once again, students participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project are flipping bits, not burgers.

The project derives its name from the Summer of Love. Now in its third year since launching in 2005, the GSoC gives student software developers an opportunity to gain practical experience creating open-source programs or helping with established projects. While most students come from computer science and computer engineering programs, a variety of educational backgrounds are represented, including students in computational biology and mainstream engineering. The students work with a mentor and are paid a stipend for their participation. According to Google’s Web site, several of the 2005 students served as mentors in 2006.

In its first three years, the GSoC engaged more than 1,000 students who worked on more than 100 open-source projects, creating hundreds of thousands of lines of code. In 2005, Google worked with 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations representing 49 countries around the world. The number increased to more than 600 in 2006. In 2007, Google accepted 131 organizations and more than 900 students. Students could submit up to 20 applications, although only one would be accepted; 6,200 applications came in.

The Goals

According to the Web site, Google’s goals for the GSoC project include releasing more open-source code for the benefit of all; inspiring young developers to participate in open-source development; help open-source projects attract new developers and committers; provide qualified students the opportunity to find summer work in a field related to their academic training; and to give students more exposure to real-world software-development scenarios, such as distributed development, software licensing and mailing list etiquette.

Google does not view this project as a recruiting tool, although the company does look at the program’s results to identify potential recruits. While past student participants have reported that their experience on the project made them more attractive to employers, most who found work are not currently employed by Google.

How It Works

A Wikipedia entry reports that early in March, prospective mentoring organizations submit applications to Google. By mid-March, Google publishes its list of accepted mentoring organizations and invites student applications. When students apply, they detail the project they want to perform. The corresponding mentoring organization evaluates the students’ proposal(s) and ranks the applications. Google then decides how many projects each mentoring organization receives, and selects the top-rated applicants for that organization. The mentoring organization must provide a mentor for each accepted project.

In mid-April, Google publishes a list of accepted student applications on its Web site. Students begin coding in late May, and Google begins issuing first payments. The mentors perform mid-term evaluations in July and final evaluations in late August. In 2006, 82 percent of the participating students received a positive evaluation. Any code developed during the course of the project belongs to the mentoring organization unless otherwise agreed.

Projects 2007

The GSoC Web site lists this year’s participating members and provides an abstract of the projects that are under way. There are far too many to cover here, but include One Laptop per Child, or OLPC , a new non-profit organization that is researching the possibilities of developing a $100 laptop. This technology would have a huge impact on how the world’s children receive their education. OLPC has eight projects in the GSoC project, dealing with such matters as exploring alternate energy systems, facilities to charge backup batteries, and similar issues.

Another participant, WordPress , the organization behind the popular open-source blogging software, has 10 projects under way. They company’s projects include coding that will facilitate page management and make it easier for bloggers to change the order of their pages. Another WordPress project involves coding that improves support for podcasting.

The Mozilla Foundation is another participating member. Its several projects include developing code to support roaming in the Thunderbird e-mail application, and coding to add Firefox support for the new JPEG 2000 image-compression algorithm. JPEG 2000 produces higher-quality images at smaller file sizes than the standard JPEG, but currently only the Safari browser renders the JPEG 2000.

Google itself has four projects running in the GSoC. Google’s own projects include development of coding to realize socket support in Google Web Toolkit on a browser level using GWT Socket module. Another Web Toolkit project seeks to “make the process of writing gadgets in it less of a challenge.”

Growing Pains

As could be expected, the GSoC project has been a learning experience for Google and the mentoring organizations, as well as the students. In the 2005 season, Google received criticism from the open-source organizations for providing insufficient time to plan projects. Nevertheless, 39 organizations participated, including FreeBSD, Apache, Ubuntu and others.

Additionally, the majority of projects stalled immediately at project end. Wikipedia quoted Google’s open-source program manager, Chris DiBona, as saying that only 30 percent of students stuck with their projects afterward. The number of surviving projects may be less than half. However, in an interview with InternetNews , DiBona said that the GSoC project isn’t only about getting coders to remain with their projects after September. Google also wants to introduce students to the open-source development process and to keep them working in a computer science-related field over the summer.

Some mentoring organizations indicated that, in future years, they would spend more time selecting appropriate projects, and would look for ones that are more likely to be completed within the time allotment.

As for GSoC 2006, things got off to a rocky start in late May when 1,800 student applicants received an erroneous e-mail saying their projects had been accepted. A follow-up e-mail a few minutes later apologized for the error, and told recipients that if they had received two e-mails, one saying they were accepted and one saying they were not accepted, then they were not accepted. Not all applicants found this amusing.

Similarly, GSoC 2007 has not been “glitch-free.” Hoping to increase the number of student applicants, Google extended the application deadline from March 24 to March 26, and then, at the last minute, to March 27. In early April, the acceptance letters were delayed for administrative reasons. At one point, Google’s Web interface erroneously changed to give each applicant a status of “not selected.” This, as Wikipedia explained it, “caused a huge number of Summer of Code result-awaiting nerds to just suffer a collective heart attack.” Google responded by saying that the acceptance e-mail was the only genuine word regarding acceptance or rejection.

Good grief! Would someone volunteer to teach the folks at Google how to use e-mail and how to update a Web site?

Anyone wanting to hear Summer of Code podcasts from participating students can surf on over to the Google Summer of Code Blog . You’ll find a number of links to podcasts and videocasts. Apparently, students who meander into Google’s headquarters are pressed into duty to create a podcast describing their activities.

Author: June Campbell
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
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