Sakai Fellows 2011 announced

Carl Hall has just been made a Sakai Fellow for "exceptional contributions to the community".  Congratulations Carl!

Impressively for our 2011 Sakai GSoC projects, I'm pretty sure Carl's elevation means that all five of our mentors are Sakai Fellows.  You can't buy training like that..

Brief bios of the 2011 Fellows can be found at  http://www.sakaiproject.org/sakai-fellows

Largest ever number of students accepted!

Huge congratulations to all FOUR of our successful applicants, all of whom impressed our mentors with their combination of skill, experience, enthusiasm and ideas.

Mai Giménez: Sakai OAE native mobile app

• Mentor: Carl Hall (Hallway Technologies)
• Mai is a final year student of computer science at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain.  Mai is a great communicator and is actually returning from a related project in Sakai CLE last year so will be hitting the ground running.



Kasun Lakpriya: Sakai CLE mobile app


• Mentor: Steve Swinsburg
 (Australian National University)
• Kasun is a final year student at the University of Moratuwa, following a computer science and engineering degree. Kasun is massively enthusiastic about this project and has the distinction of being our first GSoC student from Sri Lanka.


Aadish Kotwal: Sakai OAE Column Storage Driver


• Mentor: Ian Boston (University of Cambridge)
• Aadish impressed us immensely with his pre-application research and is probably ready to get started right now.  He is a fourth-year Computer Engineering student at the University of Mumbai, India. 

Manoj Inukolunu: Improve Sakai CLE WebDAV support

• Mentors: Anthony Whyte (University of Michigan) and Seth Theriault (Columbia University)
• A fourth-year CS student at Birla Institute Of Technology and Sciences (BITS), Pilani, Goa, Manoj is also returning from last year.  This time around though he couldn't have a more different project, or one with a better chance of wide deployment.  We're counting on you, Manoj!

Big kudos to all our other applicants also - several of the projects this year had more than one outstanding application and it really wasn't easy for us to choose.  Four slots is what Google have given us though and we're really grateful for all four of them, especially as that's the most slots ever for Sakai.  

Between now and May 23rd the students will be getting to know the Sakai project and community and talking to their mentors to flesh out their plans and prepare for the main project phase.  These projects aren't just fixing bugs; they're breaking new ground with improved and extended functionality.  It won't be enough simply to write code - the students will have to produce code which is useful and maintainable enough that others will take it on even when GSoC is over, as users and as maintainers. It's no mean challenge and they'll need to draw heavily on their mentors' experience to be successful.

So that everyone can see how they're getting on I'll be asking the students (and mentors!) to post updates here, starting with introductions, but expect to see them in JIRA, Confluence, IRC and the mailing lists as well.

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.