Questions:
Organization Name: (required)
Description: (required)
Home page: (required)
Main Organization License: (required)
Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope to gain by participating? (required)
Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. (required)
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. (required). Add a Comment (optional):
If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (required)
What is the URL for your ideas page? (required)
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 2012. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use. (required)
What is the main IRC channel for your organization? (required). Add a Comment (optional):
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 2012 site. (required).
What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible: (required)
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? (required)
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? (required)
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? (required)
What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes? (required)
Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team? : (required). Add a Comment (optional):
Backup Admin (Link ID):
Answers:
Organization Name:
Apache Bigtop
Description:
Apache Bigtop is the first attempt to create a fully integrated and tested
Big Data management distribution. Bigtop's goal is to provide a fully functional "out of the box" experience
for end users and serve as a reference for packaging and testing Apache Hadoop ecosystem components in an
integrated way.
Home page:
http://incubator.apache.org/bigtop/
Main Organization License:
Apache 2.0
Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2012? What do you hope
to gain by participating?
We hope to expose on our ongoing efforts and to create opportunities for students to learn
open source methodolgies and concepts, as well as learn packaging, quality assurance and integration testing - often overlooked
apsects of software development.
If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied
in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
n/a
What is the URL for your ideas page?
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/BIGTOP/GSOC+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 2012. If your organization uses more than one
list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know
which to use.
bigtop-dev@incubator.apache.org
bigtop-user@incubator.apache.org is for end-user support
Prospective students are encouraged to contact us as described in
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/BIGTOP/GSoC_2012_Contact_Information
What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
#bigtop on FreeNode.
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 2012 site.
We have very specific and stringent requirements listed at https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/BIGTOP/GSoC_2012_Student_Requirements
==What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors
for your organization? Please be as specific as possible: ==
All of our mentors are members of both Apache and develop Bigtop in their professional work.
Besides obvious familiarity with Bigtop, the mentors have deep experience professionally in
the core Hadoop projects as well, some are PMC members.
Besides the familiarity with Bigtop, code they possess other qualities that are useful
for successful development of this type of software:
- Experience in mentoring junior coders, possibly from an academic environment
- In-depth knowledge of user requirements.
- Prior experience mentoring successful GSOC students.
We made sure that only those members of our development team were selected
for the mentoring teamwho would be able to dedicate sufficient time and efforts
to mentoring of GSoC students and had excellent communication abilities. Our
efforts are directed towards selecting mentor-student pairs that will be
passionate about the project and have excellent communication and willingness to
work together to overcome any difficulties that might arise in the process.
Moreover, we are confident that we have sufficient overlap in codebase knowledge
and willingness to support each other among our mentors to be able to provide
seamless support for our students.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
Our mentors will keep in touch with students and perform at least weekly
reviews of the students' work via email reports and IRC discussions. We will
strongly encourage students to practice continuous involvement in the activity
on our IRC channel and mailing list. We are going to be very proactive in our
mentor-student communication efforts to avoid student withdrawal in case
problems crop up by keeping email and IRC channels open and asking students
about any problems they might have. We will use students' plans we request on
our participation requirements page to monitor their progress and practice
timely intervention should the need arise. We will regularly monitor the
students' commits to their assigned subversion branches. Our main concern is
that we must avoid having students that will only produce promises and vague
assurances of their activity instead of the actual code. Frequent reviews and
actively solicited involvement in our public developmental process should keep
the communication between students and the rest of the team open and will allow
us to monitor the progress of the students. In the most unfortunate case – when
a student will actually disappear – we plan to contact the second runner-up
candidate to see if he or she would like to continue the project, or we will
fold the project into our main development plan and ask Google to withhold the
final payment from the student who has disappeared to make sure that GSoC funds
are not wasted.
==What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? ==
We have gone to great length to make sure our entire team stands behind the
GSoC effort and there is sufficient overlap in codebase knowledge and
mentor-student interaction to avoid any interruption in student project support
in case one of our mentors becomes ill or needs to step away from the project
due to personal matters. In addition, open monitoring of the student's progress
via our public mailing list and IRC channel and subversion commits will allow
the rest of our team to keep watch on the GSoC progression. We also have more
than one backup administrator and all members of the administrative team will be
overseeing the monitoring and reporting activities of the GSoC projects.
==What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's
community before, during and after the program? ==
Community participation is a hard requirement this year. We do not intend to
select any students who do not show that they are willing and able to
communicate with our team and with the larger Bigtop. We conduct much of our
development discussion on IRC and ask students to be present there as much as
possible. We have found that the open and friendly atmosphere
characteristic of our mailing lists and RC channels has helped a number of
people make a transition from Bigtop consumers users to contributors.
We believe that by exposing students to this friendly and encouraging
environment we can foster their sense of involvement and help them see how their
accomplishments help the entire community as much as being rewarding learning
experiences for themselves.
==What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project
after GSoC concludes? ==
We know that we cannot force anyone to become involved into the Bigtop
community and Bigtop development. What we can and will do is encourage students
to participate in the Bigtop community before, during, and after GSoC and hope
that the learning experiences they go through while communicating with mentors
and participating in our mailing list and IRC discussions with developers and
users will create in them a sense of belonging to a fun-loving and friendly
community. We will attempt to help them see the value of continuous
participation in Bigtop development by making sure that they are growing as
developers and as human beings. We think that as long as the students learn,
enjoy their participation and create a bond with the larger Bigtop community
there is a good chance that they will continue their involvement after the GSoC
concludes.
Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program
administration team?
While Bigtop is a fairly new project, all of our members have a substantial depth of experience in open source
development. As an open source project, we seek to created a nurturing and friendly environment.
Backup Admin (Link ID):