Google Summer of Code/Application 2010

2. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2009? What do you hope to gain by participating?

3. Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

Apertium participated in GSoC 2009. We finally got 9 slots, and 8 out of the 9 students selected succeeded.

The report we have in [1] is unfortunately incomplete

4. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

9. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

We expect students to contact us using IRC or e-mail; we will make sure we get the following information from all applicants:

Applicants should also include a one- or two-page proposal, including a title, reasons why Google and Apertium should sponsor it, a description of how and who it will benefit, and a detailed work plan including, if possible, a brief schedule with milestones and deliverables. Include time needed to think, to program, to document and to disseminate.

List your skills and give evidence of your qualifications. Tell us what is current field of study, major, etc.
Convince us that you can do the work. In particular we would like to know whether you have programmed before in open-source projects.
Please list any non-Summer-of-Code plans you have for the Summer, especially employment and class-taking. Be specific about schedules and time commitments. we would like to be sure you have at least 20 free hours a week to develop for our project.

11. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

Students will be encouraged to let us know how they want to break up their time, and to try and plan for holidays and absences. This will avoid both mentors and students wasting time. If a mentor reports the unscheduled disappearance of a student (72-hour silence), they will be contacted by the administrators. If silence persists, their task will be frozen and we will report to Google.

It is quite unlikely, since all of the mentors are very active developers, with long-term commitment to the project. If a mentor fails to respond adequately to a student, they will have been instructed to contact the administrators. The administrators will examine the situation; if disappearance (48 hour silence) is confirmed, they will be assigned a different mentor and Google will be informed.

14. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

Developers who have been chosen as mentors will be available for as long as possible at the #apertium IRC channel, so that the student may receive guidance with any problem they may have during development and before taking decisions on which task to select.
As we did in 2009, we will try to get them involved as early as possible in the project, by granting them developer status, so they can modify code and data as any other developer would.
Depending on the number of projects chosen for development, we will organise a workshop in Alacant such as the one we organized last year FreeRBMT'09 so that the students may present their work in an academic setting to the wider group of developers and to the community in general.

15. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

We will ensure that their work is well publicised and appreciated among the development community, this often gives a developer impetus to continue.
Whenever there is a relevant research or development component in their work, we will make sure they can use it as part of their undergraduate or graduate work, and offer guidance when writing papers.
We feel that the field of machine translation is fascinating, and as soon as they've spent a few months developing, they'll be hooked for life!

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