Good news: Freifunk has been accepted again as mentoring organization for GSoC. If you’re a student, please bookmark March 20th in your calendar. That is the date when student application period opens and proposals can be submitted. In the meantime you should visit our ideas page and get in touch with the mentors and our community.
Applications for GSoC
This year we offer much more ideas than in the past but as always we don’t know how many slots (aka projects) we will get from google at the end. So we can’t give you any guarantee for proposals to be chosen. We will select the students and assign them to projects, but the final announcement will be made by the GSoC Program Office.
You aren’t limited to the ideas listed on our ideas page. It is possible to propose your own idea. But keep in mind that you need a mentor from one of our communities, too.
If want to apply please visit our students checklist page before. You can find a lot of information there on how to get in touch with our community. You’ll also find our application template there. It’s necessary to follow that template for a successful application.
During GSoC
There are some things we expect from you:
- provide status updates to your mentor and your project, you should specify details with your mentor (how often, what medium to use, …)
- commit early and often to the public repositories of your project
- sign up our WLANWare mailinglist
- join one of our community meetings
- write at least 4 blog posts at this blog:
- During the community bonding period. Deadline is May 30 – introduce your project here, present your ideas, show us your project plan with milestone
- Before first evaluations. Deadline is June 26 – show your results and explain your status
- Before second evaluations. Deadline is July 24 – show your results and explain your status
- Before final evaluations. Deadline is August 21 – finally present your project and show us your result. Maybe it’s already live 🙂
To give you a short prospect of what is planned to get you into the project after successful application:
Timeline
Community Bonding (May)
Use this period to refine your proposal. Add more specific milestones. Try to get into software development, e.g. by fixing small bugs. Talk to your mentor and the developers of your project to introduce yourself and your proposal.
From 26th to the 28th of May (the last weekend before Coding Phase 1 starts) there’s the Wireless Community Weekend (WCW) in Berlin. Here the Freifunk community will meet with their guests to create an unconference and hackathon. You have the chance to learn a lot about free wireless networks. It’s your chance to show your project/idea to a lot of community members. So you can get your first feedback before coding starts.
If you need help with accomodation or travel costs, please don’t hesitate to ask your mentors or organization admins.
Coding phases
There’s something new this year: We have 3 coding phases with 3 evaluations. Both, students and mentors have to complete evaluations to proceed. Maybe you can use these evaluations as milestones of if you want to work agile as sprint dates.
If you can’t make it to the WCW in May there’s another great chance in the first coding period to meet a lot of developers and community members during Battlemesh V10 in Vienna from June 05 to June 10. Focus of this event are routing protocols. You can use that event to get a lot of detailed technical knowledge, e.g. by doing pair programming.
If you have any questions please contact the organization admins.
So let’s have a great summer! 🙂
(Thanks to Clemens who wrote some parts if this text before)
