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GSoC Organization Application 2022

Douglas DeMaio edited this page Sep 1, 2022 · 8 revisions

Application Instructions

Students are encouraged to visit 101.opensuse.org. The website lists multiple projects for the organization. Students can view the description of the projects and contact the organization's mentors if students have questions or need more information regarding a project. This will help students when writing their proposals to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Most of the projects focus on enhancing features or optimizing a new feature. Students should be committed to finishing the project during the months GSoC. Students should be familiar with the programming language(s) used by the project. Students are expected to have regular contact with their mentor and should contact the organization's administrators if they have any concerns or questions with regard to the project, program or mentor(s).

Organization Application

Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code? (1000 char)

We started openSUSE with the principles of free software as primary driver to give all people the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software they use. As a Linux distribution, we integrate, maintain and provide access to thousands of Open Source software projects. A healthy and growing developer community is the key to our success. It is important for us to attract new people to participate in the openSUSE community who provide new perspectives and backgrounds; GSoC is an opportunity to do that. openSUSE is an ideal fit for GSoC because we offer projects in different areas of Open Source. Students are mentored by experienced hackers from one of the oldest and diverse Open Source communities, which has proven structures, methods, processes and infrastructure. We advertise GSoC and the ideas that are at the heart of it to our whole community, which not only consists of developers but also millions of users.

What does your organization consider to be a successful summer?

The organization would consider a successful summer to be turning each student into a long-time open-source contributor. Giving each student the knowledge, skills and passion to pursue their software development goals is the standard our organization strives to achieve. We want give them the confidence and knowledge to apply for developer position. Having the students become contributing members of the open-source development community is the ultimate organizational goal.

How many potential mentors have agreed to mentor this year?

6-10 for 2021. Each year is different

How will you keep mentors engaged with their students?

Our mentors are experienced long-time contributors to Open Source and to the openSUSE community in particular, and most of them have already participated in previous GSoC iterations, either as a student or as a mentor. Mentors are good entry points to participate in the community. openSUSE mentors and our administration team, are prepared and willing to build long-term relationships with their students, which focuses on setting goals, expectations, tracking and reporting the progress through agile collaboration. We describe thoroughly what we expect from a good mentor in our mentoring guidelines: http://101.opensuse.org/mentor/ Every year at the openSUSE Conference, our GSoC mentors can and meet to discuss our participation. To share our experiences during the program and to address challenges, we'll organize a bi-weekly mentor and a final retrospective meeting.

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

We believe in putting the Student's needs first. Mentoring is about them, not about the mentors or openSUSE's needs. So we always emphasize the mentee's need for learning, purpose, and fun. We encourage proposals that set clear goals for the project and expectations from students. Mentors are required to set up regular milestones that are reviewed and celebrated together. We believe that communicating on a regular schedule (daily at least) is what bonds mentors/mentee and we consider the consistency of that relationship very important. The project has communications tools for video conferencing and is highly engaged with several social media platforms so students have many different options to discuss their projects in real-time communication. The administration team is focused on providing the best infrastructure for nurturing these relationships with tooling, marketing and guidance through regular discussions with both mentors and mentees. Administrators regularly communicate with the mentors about deadlines and tasks to be completed.

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

From the first day, we will integrate the students as valued members of our community. We emphasize the need for communication as the basis of all collaboration in an Open Source project by having students report (at least weekly) about their progress to our community including mid-term and retrospective blog posts for our news portal https://news.opensuse.org/, which has been improved to encourage contributions from our community. Blogs about their progress can be created at https://github.com/openSUSE/news-o-o and students can submit a pull request for their blog to be published. openSUSE's social media accounts will also share the student's blogs describing their progress throughout GSoc. To promote the collaboration between the students, to share experiences and to address challenges, the administration team organizes events for the student to meet. We will encourage our students to attend our Conference (June 2 -4 in Nuremberg, Germany and held virtually). Students can use our travel support program (https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Travel_Support_Program) to attend and meet the community.

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

It's our belief that students join Open Source because of the technology, but they stay because of the people in the community. We emphasize selecting students with the intention of a long-term contribution to openSUSE and we train our mentors to focus on building a personal relationship with the student. Many of our previous students are still active in our community. We believe that meeting other students, mentors and collaborators in person was a big part of building that community relationship. To actively support the contribution afterward, we are prepared to offer students follow up projects before GSoC ends. Either with the same mentor or projects from our own mentoring program openSUSE 101 (http://101.opensuse.org).

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

Yes

Which years did your org participate in GSoC?

2021, 2020, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2009, 2008, 2006

How many students did your org accept for 2021?

7

How many of your org's 2021 students have been active in your community in the past 60 days?

3

For each year your organization has participated, counts of successful and total students:

Accepted 2021: 6/7 2020: 3/3 2018: 2/2 2017: 5/5 2016: 6/6 2014: 14/14 2013: 10/12 2012: 9/12 2011: 13/14 2009: 6/9 2008: n/n 2006: n/n

Is there an organization new to GSoC that you would like to refer to the program for 2021? Feel free to add a few words about why they'd be a good fit:

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

2015

What year was your project started? 2005

Where does your source code live?

https://github.com/openSUSE

Is your organization part of any government?

No

Organization Profile

Name

openSUSE Project

Website URL

https://www.opensuse.org

Tagline: A very short description of your organization (80 Characters)

Our community creates, promotes, improves and documents open-source software.

# Open source license

GPLv2

# Organization Category

Operating Systems

# Tech Tags

Linux, Python, Kubernetes, AI, Rust

# Topic Tags

Operating Systems, software quality, developer tools, containers

Ideas List - Enter the URL of your ideas List page:

https://101.opensuse.org/

Short Description

The openSUSE project is a community effort to enhance and promote the use of Linux. openSUSE creates one of the world's best Linux distributions, as well as a variety of tools.

Long Description

The openSUSE Project is a worldwide effort that promotes the use of Linux, tools around it, and open source. The openSUSE community is made up of multiple contributing communities that collaborate as part of a global open-source network. The openSUSE community develops, builds and maintains many of the packages, tools and infrastructure for the distribution. The community works together in an open, transparent and friendly manner as part of the global Free and Open Source Software community. openSUSE creates one of the world's best Linux distributions, as well as a variety of tools, such as OBS, OpenQA, Kiwi, YaST, OSEM and Uyuni. Distributions include a rolling release (Tumbleweed), a stable annual release (Leap) and operating systems for edge, embedded, cloud and containers through MicroOS and Kubic.

The project is controlled by its community and relies on the contributions of individuals, working as testers, writers, translators, usability experts, artists and ambassadors or developers. The project embraces a wide variety of technology, people with different levels of expertise, speaking different languages and having different cultural backgrounds.

Application Instructions

Students are encouraged to visit 101.opensuse.org. The website lists multiple projects for the organization. Students can view the description of the projects and contact the organization's mentors if students have questions or need more information regarding a project. This will help students when writing their proposals to participate in the Google Summer of Code. Most of the projects focus on enhancing features or optimizing a new feature. Students should be committed to finishing the project during the months GSoC. Students should be familiar with the programming language(s) used by the project. Students are expected to have regular contact with their mentor and should contact the organization's administrators if they have any concerns or questions with regard to the project, program or mentor(s).

Proposal Tags

AI, Kubernetes, operating system, containers, quality software, build tools, rust, python, golang, devops

Contact Methods

# Chat to IRC Channel

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:IRC_list

# Mailing List

https://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Mailing_lists

Email

opensuse-project@opensuse.org

Twitter

https://twitter.com/@opensuse

Blog

https://news.opensuse.org/

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