GSoC 2014 Organization Application¶
Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2014? What do you hope to gain by participating?
Our project has already greatly benefited from contributions by students community members and by our own association with university programs. While building mobile security software is something that requires a great deal of experience to do right, we also know that it is topic that draws the interest of a great deal of young talented minds. We want to ensure these minds know that building open-source software for the good of humanity, and especially people at risk like activists, journalists and human rights defenders, is an important, fruitful undertaking, that they might even make a career out of.
Also, our mission of providing easy to use tools for privacy is only strengthened when more people with different backgrounds use our apps and get involved in the process of making them. Summer of Code gives an opportunity to reach new audiences based on the students who participate.
How many potential mentors do you have for this year's program? What criteria did you use to select them?
Two - myself and Hans Steiner. We have both been GSoC mentor's before on other projects (Tor/EFF and Debian) and are the two primary developers in the Guardian Project. We have both also been adjunct professors at New York University, and enjoy teaching and mentoring as a component of our regular lives. Depending on the project or topic selected, we will determine which of us should be the primary mentor, and how the greater development team can play role in supporting the effort, as well.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
We will come up with as structured of plan for regular interaction, updates, check-ins as possible, to ensure that we can detect when we are straying off course as soon as possible. As we already run a highly distributed, async development process that spans team members around the globe, it is a very natural type of interaction. That said, if we feel a student is going astray, we'll ensure that we have multiple means of contact, and work to get them back on course in as constructive manner as possible.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
As we are both full time focused on this work, and both previous mentors for other projects, the likelihood of disappearance is low. That said, we will ensure that a backup administrator for the project (our current grants/program manager) has all of our contact information and is empowered to track us down, harass us and annoy us until we respond.
We also have a deep team of both paid and unpaid technical staff on the Guardian Project, that could be used as backup mentors in case of a complete failure of the primary mentors. Each of the projects proposed for students to focus on have multiple team members involved, so there is already a pool to choose from.
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program?
We already have a fairly active community through our mailing lists, IRC channel, Twitter and Google+. We will ensure that all of these channels know about our involvement in GSoC, to maximize the quality of our applicants. We already have a number of existing students interested, with some already having completed minor patches or other work on projects. During the program we will actively blog, hold "Mobile Security Open Office Hour" hangouts highlighting the GSoC progess, and otherwise publicly document the work the student is up to.
What will you do to encourage your accepted students to stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?
We have numerous opportunities for active volunteers in our project to move to more committed, long term roles. This includes being charged with maintaining a project or library, or taking on high profile tasks that will benefit their studies and resume. We also have the ability to hire contributors on a freelance basis for various contracts and grant funding that we are fortunate to have. In the end, it is about providing positive reinforcement, constructive feedback and an opportunity for their work to be highlighted, and for their experience to grow. Providing for these will ensure that people stick around.
Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.
The Tor Project
EFF
K9Mail (Jesse Vincent, former GSoC)
Lucas Dixon (Google Ideas)
Adam Langley (Google)
Chris Palmer (Google)
Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here.
Ignite Realtime (SMACK XMPP library)
If you chose "veteran" in the organization profile dropdown, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.
Sathyanarayanan Gunasekaran via Tor Project 2011 - PASS. It was a success as "GSathya" is still an active contributor to the Tor Project. Having him come from India to Waterloo, Canada was an important aspect of the summer together.
If you are a new organization, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
This is our first year applying directly. In the past, I have mentored a successful student through the Tor Project (he is now a Tor core developer), and Hans-Christoph Steiner has mentored through Debian.
Is there anything else we should know or you'd like to tell us that doesn't fit anywhere else on the application?
Obviously it is an important time for the issue of security and privacy, especially when it comes to mobile software and devices. Our work is critical in that we both provide end-user applications to enhance privacy, and code libraries for other developers to improve their applications.
Support from GSoC will help us continue building our capabilities, and ideally be the beginning of a successful way for us to build our community and team going forward.