GSoC 2010 Organization Proposal
Note: In reply to Applying to Google Summmer of Code
- Organization Name
- Description
- Home page
- Main Organization License
- Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating?
- Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
- If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
- What is the URL for your ideas page?
- 9. What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?
- What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
- Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
- Who will be your backup organization administrator?
- What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
- What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
- What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
- What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
- What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
- Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team?
1. Organization Name
- InVesalius Community
2. Description
The InVesalius community is an open source group that develops software and features for medical imaging professionals. Founded during November 2007 in the Brazilian Public Software Portal, with the support of Brazilian Ministry of Planning, the InVesalius community has over 3.600 registered members from 68 countries who contribute to InVesalius. We work with open source process and tools - including Python, VTK (Visualization Toolkit) and wxPython. Applications developed by the InVesalius community are used today by thousands of professionals from various fields, among which medicine, odontology, veterinary, archeology and engineering. The InVesalius community is a organized group of people and it's main developers are sponsored by:
- CTI: a research center of the Brazilian Ministry of Science and Technology;
- CNPq: Brazilian National Counsel of Technological and Scientific Development.
3. Home page
4. Main Organization License
5. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating?
The InVesalius community is applying to participate in GSoC because we believe GSoC can help our organization in several ways. We have had contact with former GSoC students and mentors, and we are very enthusiastic about the program.
Among the goals we expect to achieve through our participation in GSoC are:
- Bring new people to the open source world;
- Bring new and talented developers to our community;
- Get help to develop some of our projects;
- Meet new people and have fun during the summer.
6. Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
No.
7. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
No. We considered applying in GSoC 2009, but we were not confident that our community was mature enough to support such initiative. After several brainstorms, we decided we were ready for applying in GSoC 2010.
8. What is the URL for your ideas page?
Our main GSoC 2010 page:
Direct link to our ideas page:
9. What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?
Currently all InVesalius core developers are Brazilian, and for this reason the main development forum is in Portuguese. If you speak Portuguese, contact us using the Portuguese-Speaking Devel Forum, otherwise, contact us by using the English-Speaking Forum:
- Portuguese-speaking devel forum:
http://www.softwarepublico.gov.br/dotlrn/clubs/invesalius/forums/forum-view?forum_id=631001
- English-speaking forum:
http://www.softwarepublico.gov.br/dotlrn/clubs/invesalius/forums/forum-view?forum_id=2327644
Note: It is necessary to be registered to InVesalius? Community (http://svn.softwarepublico.gov.br/trac/invesalius/wiki/InVesalius/Register) in order to see and post messages at the Forums.
10. What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
The main IRC channel for the InVesalius community is #invesalius @ freenode.
11. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
Yes. Student Template
12. Who will be your backup organization administrator?
- Admin: Tatiana Al-Chueyr (tatiana.alchueyr)
- Backup: Thiago Moraes (totonixsame)
13. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
Experienced, very active and respected developers of InVesalius (3 years, 6 years and 2 years experience). Also, all the mentors have significant participation on open source communities.
These mentors, also, have been involved on training students to develop InVesalius in universities, conferences and through the online community. They are strongly motivated and will help our community reach our GSoC goals. We desire to provide a pleasant summer of code to the students that we host.
14. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
We hope to overcome this issue as much as possible during the students selection process. We will be careful in selecting students who have additional commitments during the GSoC coding period, We would like to avoid those situations where a student might be overloaded with work.
Additionally, we will require students to submit weekly reports to their mentors and assigned backup mentors. This will help to keep track of the students progress. We are also going to require bi-weekly submissions of status reports for all projects to the InVesalius community mailing list. This way, we can monitor our students status at any time in order to avoid potential issues that may arise during the coding period.
Lastly, at the beginning of the GSoC coding period the students and their mentors will review and adapt their project schedules in order to assure that project scopes are realistic.
Besides the preventive measures described above, we will always try to keep our students motivated, so they don't disappear.
15. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
We are planning in such a way that every project has "backup" mentors. This person will be involved in the project development. In the case of problems with the primary mentor, the backup mentor shall assist the student in order to accomplish the final goals of the project. The organization administration will also be in touch with all of the mentors, so that we can prevent possible problems throughout the duration of the project.
16. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
We expect to have as main way of communication with the students our discussion forums and IRC channels. Before the coding period begins, we will encourage students to brainstorm all of their ideas for possible projects with the community. This way, the students will have a better grasp of the kinds of projects that the community would like to see developed. This preliminary discussion will be very important for our overall organization of the GSoC coding period.
We'll motivate students to share their thoughts, problems, and decisions with the community. The community will also be able to offer possible solutions for anything that comes up.
Regarding the source code, students will have a branch on InVesalius SVN and will be motivated to constantly post patches to trunk. After several successful commits and patches, we expect to give trunk commit permission.
We also should be using Trac system to guide and see our students progress.
We are interested on teaching students in a way they become InVesalius core developers and members. They will be given credits for all their work, and we expect that in the future they will be qualified to mentor other students in GSoC projects both related to InVesalius and other open software community.
17. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
The InVesalius community is a active and friendly community. During the GSoC coding period, our mentors will help to motivate the students. But our community will also be integral in helping to motivate, making suggestions, and overseeing the scope of each project. In effect, the students can feel a community reward: to be a part of the community. This community commitment will ensure more collaboration with our community aside from GSoC. Also, we'll recognize the students effords and accomplishments. We believe that the community reward and motivation is one of the key factors for any good and solid open source project.
18. Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team?
To develop technology in medicine is extremely overwhelming, because we are directly improving injured people's life. Our aim in the development of InVesalius is try and leave this world a little better than we found. We realize we're managing to achieve this, when members from the community report that InVesalius helped to diagnosis complex diseases or to guide trials, as a forensic tool.
Google Summer of Code represents to us a great opportunity of teaching and learning with students. It would help us on the development of InVesalius and on improving our open source community.
If InVesalius Community is approved as a mentoring organization, we will outcome our best and we will motivate students to do the same, so not only the medical and open source communities, but also the society is benefit from our work.
