What is Google Summer of Code (GSoC)?

Google Summer of Code is Google’s summer program for students to learn about, and get involved in open source. It’s happening again for the 17th year in 2021! Over 16,000 students from 111 countries have participated.

Freifunk got accepted as umbrella organization for wireless network communities like Ninux, qaul.net, Guifi.net or WLAN Slovenija and communities developing software we extensively use like OpenWRT, OLSR, BATMAN, libremesh or retroshare. See our GSoC’s profile page for more information.

The goals of the program are to:

• Motivate students to begin participating in open source development.
• Help open source projects bring in new, excited developers into their communities who stay long after their GSoC ends.
• Provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits.
• Give students exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., testing, version control, software licensing, mailing-list etiquette, etc.).
• Create more open source code.

How does GSoC work?

Programming online from their home, student participants spend 10 weeks on their projects (about 175 total hrs) earning stipends upon completion of their milestones. Volunteer mentors help students plan their time, answer questions and provide guidance on best practices, project-specific tools, and community norms while helping integrate students into their communities.

Students receive an invaluable learning experience, an introduction to the global FOSS community and something that potential employers love to see on resumes!

Mentoring orgs will gain new contributions & contributors along with recognition from Google and a higher profile for their project.

How to apply for freifunk @ GSoC 2021?

1. Pick an idea from our projects page and get in touch with mentors and the community.
2. Discuss your ideas and proposals.
3. Submit a draft of your proposal early, so we can give you feedback.
4. If you have any general questions, join our Matrix room.

Student applications are open March 29 – April 13, 2021.

Who can apply?

In short: you have to be at least 18 years when you register and you need to be enrolled in or accepted into a post-secondary academic program, including a college, university, masters program, PhD program, undergraduate program, licensed coding school. For all details, please see GSoC’s FAQ.

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:
  1. During the community bonding period. Deadline is May 30 – introduce your project here, present your ideas, show us your project plan with milestone
  2. Before first evaluations. Deadline is June 26 – show your results and explain your status
  3. Before second evaluations. Deadline is July 24 – show your results and explain your status
  4. 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)