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Summer of Code 2007 Application
Last updated at 11:43 pm UTC on 3 March 2008

Squeak's Summer of Code 2007 application


Summer of Code 2008 Application

This is the working page for Squeak's application to Google's Summer of Code 2007 program.

Deadlines

Submission of mentoring organizations' applications: March 5th-12th
Submission of students' applications: March 14th-24th

Mailing list

The mailing list for this project is available at http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/soc.

Links

Project Ideas for Google Summer of Code 2007
Google Summer of Code 2007

Participants (w/ Google/Gmail account)


Application questions

There's a list of questions that will be asked by Google as part of the application project. Here's a copy of the questions, along with answers.
All these questions must have answers before March 5th.

  1. Describe your organization.
    Squeak is a Smalltalk dialect and a programming environment created by many of the original Smalltalk authors. Its first edition was released in 1996, and it's currently at version 3.9, with a 3.10 version under development. It has spawned many related projects, both non-commercial (such as Squeakland, Croquet, Scratch, Sophie) and commercial (Plopp, DabbleDB). It's also the main developer platform for the Seaside web framework.
    The Squeak community is helped by the Squeak Foundation, a small organization dedicated to support Squeak's development. The Squeak Foundation will be incorporated as a 501(c) non-profit during 2007.
    The Squeak Foundation takes care of all the bureaucratic tasks for the community (providing funding for server and connectivity costs, etc.); all the other tasks and problems, including technical ones, are handled by the community.
  2. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2007? What do you hope to gain by participating?
    Smalltalk and Squeak have remained on the corner of the open source world for a long time. Participating in the Google Summer of Code program will help it gain some more visibility.
    We are aware that Smalltalk has a peculiar approach to computing and to development, and that getting your head around it and becoming part of the community may not be as easy as with some other languages. Participanting in the Google Summer of Code program will help the mentors, and the community at large, to better bring people into the community and make them feel welcome.
    Finally, having developers who are paid to work on our software will give us an opportunity to improve our programming environment and tools to make them more uniform and accessible.
  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.
    Squeak didn't participate in the past editions of the program.
  4. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
    We thought about participating in 2006, but were unable to submit our application in time.
  5. Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.
    The administrator for the SoC 2007 program will be Giovanni Corriga (Google Account: gcorriga).
  6. What license does your project use?
    Squeak 1.1 is triple licensed: Squeak License, APSL2, ASL. All new code is produced under the MIT license. The Squeak Foundation is undergoing an effort in order to relicense all produced code under the MIT License.
  7. What is the URL for your ideas page?
    Project Ideas for Google Summer of Code 2007 - http://wiki.squeak.org/squeak/5936
  8. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
    http://lists.squeakfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/squeak-dev
  9. What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
    #squeak on the Freenode network.
  10. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
    No template.
  11. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.
    Stéphane Ducasse (Google Account: stephane.ducasse)
  12. Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account Information.
    Andrew P. Black (Google Account: andrew.p.black)
    Marcus Denker (Google Account: marcus.denker)
    Stéphane Ducasse(Google Account: stephane.ducasse)
    Ralph Johnson (Google Account: rjohnson.uiuc)
    James Foster (Google Account: WeybridgeWay)
    Brian Rice (Google Account: BrianTRice)
    Todd Blanchard (Google Account: squeakntodd)
    Bryce Kampjes (Google Account: bryce@kampjes.demon.co.uk)
    Keith Hodges (Google Account: keith_hodges@yahoo.co.uk)
    Giovanni Corriga (Google Account: gcorriga)(backup mentor)
  13. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
    The mentors has been selected amongst those who volunteered for the job. All the selected volunteers are longstanding members of the Squeak and Smalltalk communities; most of them already had mentoring experiences (as university professors and researchers).
  14. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
    We'll try to prevent student disappearing:Before the project starts, we'll collect their contact info, both online and offline (IM contacts, skype contacts, phone numbers). In case this doesn't work, we'll call the A-Team.
  15. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
    Before the project starts, we'll collect all the mentors' contact info. Students will have the info for their mentors.
    We'll assign two mentors per student, so that in case one of them disappears, the other one will still be there. We'll have a couple of backup mentors ready to step up in case of mentor disappearances.
  16. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
    We'll try to have periodic (weekly or bi-weekly) IM/IRC meetings with them. We'll ask them to subscribe to the development lists. We'll encourage them to open a blog (to be syndicated on Planet Squeak and Planet Smalltalk) and to hang around on the IRC channel.
  17. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
    First of all, we trust that the accepted students won't be "in it for the money", so they will be interested in sticking with the project even after the conclusion of GSoC.
    Also, the ideas that we'd like to propose will be fun enough to keep the students' interest piqued.
    Finally, the students' work will possibly be included in the main Squeak distribution (either in the main codeline or as a add-on package)