Feedback from our 2011 application process

I asked members of our Google Group for feedback on our application process.

First off, students really appreciated the responsiveness of mentors, on the group and directly.  This year we've tried to keep as many of the early discussions on the group as possible so they can help other applicants and take the place of a FAQ.

An outstanding suggestion we will be using is to have successful candidates blog getting started with Sakai and its large codebase, to help future GSoC students and the official community 'getting started' guides too.

Future ideas on the ideas page will have associated Jira tickets (bugs/issues/tasks) wherever possible, or discussion pages where that makes more sense.

We'll also encourage mentors to include 'initial assignments' that can serve to introduce the project for accepted candidates during the socialisation period and give applicants a way to show their skills - it's a neat and constructive way of having a 'coding challenge' element which is popular in many other orgs.

I think we'll also be trying to streamline the whole application process and make it less intimidating. We've had fewer applications per project this year than last (so far anyway - applications are still open) so it probably needs to be more exciting and more accessible. Between the blog, Google group, ideas page and Melange page there's a lot of information to take in, and that's before even starting on the Sakai community pages.

Kudos to Kasun Lakpriya, Nandana Mihindukulasooriya, Avinash Parida and Aadish Kotwal for their terrific feedback.    

Student Application deadline approaching!

Friday is the last day to get in your applications!

If you're interested in any of Sakai's six absolutely great projects now's the time to make tracks to our application template and start asking questions.  We'll try our best to answer quickly and even give you feedback on your application.  When you're ready, submit your application via Melange.

Here they are again for you:

1. Sakai CLE mobile app
2. Improve Sakai CLE WebDAV support
3. Sakai OAE native mobile app
4. Sakai OAE Column Storage Driver
5. Integrate Luke as a Felix Web Console Plugin
6. Implement Social API interfaces of OpenSocial

We've had interest up and down the list but it's fair to say number 1 is proving popular, while 2, 5 and 6 are still completely open fields application wise. 

Why are these great projects you should seriously be applying for?  First and foremost, the project mentors are all professional developers and ninjas - you can't buy this sort of training.  Second, these are all tremendously valuable projects to Sakai and using interesting and up to date technologies.  WebDAV support is practically guaranteed to be used by tens of thousands of people - think about having that to boast of on your resume.  Building a management interface using Luke and Felix for key Apache Solr-powered search functionality, in a highly modular software environment using many cutting-edge OSS projects, is a classic piece of CV-enhancing development which will get you experience in search and many other technologies.  Implementing OpenSocial APIs for Sakai OAE is a key part of Sakai's open and social vision and not only introduces you to social technologies but API-building in general.

You know you want this - now get on your bike and apply!

Sakai accepted in GSoC 2011!

Great news for Sakai and potential GSoC applicants - the Google open source team have accepted us into GSoC 2011! This means the student application process starts now - get to know the project now and when applications open you'll have a head start. Get in touch on the Google Group or #sakai on Freenode. See you there!

Draft: 2011 application form for students

In previous years we asked students to send in their application forms as web pages, the idea being to demonstrate some skills in usability, communication, design and coding. It was a bit hit and miss, partly because not everyone has a hosting facility, so I've changed the application template to leave that out and instead encourage applicants to give us evidence of what they have done, and can do.  I'm sharing it here so the Sakai community can help me improve it, so this might change!

We don't require you to have worked on an open source project before, or to have worked on (or even used!) Sakai. We're just looking for enthusiastic people with great communication skills and the ability to create and build really usable web-based user interfaces. We hope that you'll find our application template fairly easy to fill out.  



Please note that we can give you feedback on your applications to help you make them stronger. If you have a draft application, contact the project mentor or share in on #sakai on Freenode and we will try to provide feedback and suggestions. The earlier you get in touch, the better we can help you make your application!

 This is what we're looking for:

 • you've invested time in familiarising yourself with Sakai
 • interest in Sakai's design choices and philosophy
 • skills and enthusiasm to take control of your projects
 • self-knowledge to know what you will find hard, what easy, what you can achieve in 13 weeks, and when to ask questions
 • able to work in a development community, or at least a team
 • able to create specifications, as well as execute them
 • unafraid to look at and skim through large amounts of code
 • experience in key technologies and languages expected in the project
 • some idea about usability and user-centric design
 • good communication skills - the results of your project will be more than code, so think of this application as a chance to showcase a few paragraphs of your writing

It's best not to treat this as a shopping list - just use the application template to tell us about yourself, give us some evidence of your skills and experience, and tell us why you'd like to work on a GSoC 2011 Sakai project. 
  
Here is the application template:

1. Do you have a blog, home page or other feed? If so, what is the URL?
2. Where are you at in your education? What are your educational and career plans and hopes?
3. Why Sakai?
4. Which project from the Sakai GSoC ideas page are you interested in?
5. Why have you chosen this particular project?
6. Explain how you plan to succeed in that project within the short time frame of the summer.  (Goals, risks, project stages, tools - we don't expect you to know everything already, but show us your thinking)

7. Tabulate or list your language experience. Include any major frameworks, libraries and standards too.  Give a very brief summary of experience in each. Give links us to examples if you can.

8. What experiences do you have participating in open source projects or development teams? Please back these up with links wherever possible
.
9. Do you have any other activities this summer that will take a significant amount of time? (This is not about vacations - it is about responsibilities that you have in addition to the Summer of Code effort)
10. (optional) Tell us anything else that would illustrate the qualities we're looking for.
11. 
What are the best ways for us to contact you?
12. If your resume isn't on your home page, please paste it as text here.

GSoC 2011 kicks off

Google have announced the great news that they'll be running GSoC again in 2011, and needless to say Sakai project is applying to be a mentor organization.

We've received inquiries from some great potential applicants already so we're really hoping to be accepted.  I've been busy updating our blog and Google groups livery and, sending in our application to Google, and most importantly starting a new ideas page on Confluence.  I've already asked Ian Boston and Carl Hall, past GSoC mentors and two of Sakai OAE's leading lights, to put together project proposals, and I'm about to throw it open to the sakai-dev list.

If you're interested in applying as a student this year keep an eye on the ideas page - there will definitely be some projects up by March 11th when applications from mentoring orgs close, and more will probably appear up to when student applications open on March 28th.

In the meantime, take advantage of your head start by getting to know Sakai and getting in touch with any ideas of your own - I'd recommend starting in #sakai on freenode.net or the Sakai-GSoC Google Group.

Pencils down

Google Summer of Code 2010 is drawing to a close and Sakai's three students all have exciting contributions to share.  it's particularly great to see that all three are planning to keep up their involvement with Sakai. Many thanks to Google for running another great GSoC, to our volunteer mentors, and everyone in the community who has helped out.

Manoj Inukolunu has implemented a citation manager widget, helped by some joint mentoring from Cambridge, writes:

I have created a citation manager widget for sakai3 with the following features: Add citations, Export in RIS format, Import in RIS format from other reference managers, Comment on Citations, Fetch citations from other sakai3 users, Share the citations, Search for citations (bugs remaining), Delete a specific citation. There are 2 features that needs to be implemented 1) Embed the widget into a course site 2) Add delicious support to Sakai3 (Sakai3 needs to support Oauth for this so waiting) A detailed specification and implementation details can be found at [1].

It has been a wonderful experience to work the Sakai Foundation. The developers have done a great job with the back-end and front-end. The best part was the modularity and the design. My project in the beginning was to use external citation-managers and design a citation-manager for Sakai3.The project changed a lot since the beginning [1]. I found my project intimidating in the beginning because I didnt know what to do.I did a lot of research and came up with the design spec [1] with the help of my mentor (Amyas Phillips who has been a great mentor). GSoC has been the single greatest experience in my life so far and the most productive summer so far, the interaction with the community(thanks very much for all the guys who helped me ) was the best part.I learned many things. The real world experience I gained was very valuable. I feel sad that the program is coming to an end. I am planning to continue with my project after GSoC I am also planning to join the sakai community.

My specification and implementation details are at [1] Code is at [2] and[3]

[1] http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/3AK/Citation+Manager+widget+specification+proposal
[2] http://github.com/zerocool1989/citation-manager-widget
[3] http://github.com/zerocool1989/exportRIS

Maria Teresa Gimenez Fayos has developed an Android app for interacting with Sakai 2.x instances, working with mentor David Roldan Martinez at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, summarises her GSoC experience thus:

I have archived the main framework of the application, I am still working in a lot of things, I hope some things would be working at the end of this week. There is a lot of work that should be done, because I really thought that the project would be easier, and it is not.

Of course I am planning to continue working on it! In fact this is going to be my final career project. I am going to use all what I learned about android and sakai in this project. So even I could not finish all what I was planning I am not worry because I am going to finish everything, I spend a lot of time of my gsoc learning about the technology and I am going to take advantage of all this knwoledge to put it in the project. At this point I would like to thank David, for all his patience. 

I am related with the open source since my second year at the university when I joined to an open source association called Aditel, and there is where I know GSOC when some fellow participated and they were so happy with the experience that I want to try it too. I knew about Sakai when I began my business practices with Samoo two years ago. Then I have being doing practices in my university (Valencia Polytechnic University) with David Roldán who is being my mentor this last year. I proposed my project, an Android Application, and it came to me from my needs as student.

The community could find all the code is here: http://bitbucket.org/mrs.hopper/nellodee
And I write a blog (in spanish sorry) about sakai, android, technology and so on in http://www.colorines.org/

Ashish Mittal has been developing an 'event explorer tool' for helpdesk users with mentor Ian Boston at Cambridge.  Ashish writes:

It has been a great experience to work under Sakai for GSOC 2010. It is mainly because of the opportunity of working with great experienced people, having a great mentor, working with the most cutting edge technologies for the project and developing a great and successful project at the end. I am very happy I got selected under Sakai Foundation for GSOC and will cherish this period of my introduction to Sakai Community, People at Sakai are great and very helpful and been available through IRC or mailing list whenever any help was needed. This has been the greatest event for me till now and I thank Sakai community for this.

A large part of the project has been accomplished and all the main and essential modules were completed well in time. There might be scope for more work to be done and I think it would be beneficial to the project to add some more features (ex. analysis) as decided earlier to give it an elegant touch.

I do plan to keep adding some features as and when it is possible. I will be consulting my mentor and will ask his opinion what can be worked out.

All the code I have developed is present under my github repo at [1]. The Sakai version of the code has already been included by my mentor in the sandbox area under the name eventexplorer.

[1] http://github.com/ashishmittal/eventexplorer

Tenth week of Event Explorer (Ashish)

The past week I worked on various resourceType for the filters that I need in the UI. Mr. Ian created a page at the KernDoc with those resourceTypes for maintaining a documentation and I have been adding more as I find them. Once I get enough information about all resourceTypes, I will be able to implement the filters.
This week I will continue with this and discuss with my mentor about what is to be done now.