[OPEN-ILS-DEV] Google Summer of Code 2011 application?

[Dan Scott]

Per my action item from the last developer meeting
(http://evergreen-ils.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=dev:meetings:2011-02-01),
I agreed to forward this information to the list to see if there is
interest and resources available to put together an application for the
Google Summer of Code.

The Google Summer of Code program “offers student developers stipends to
write code for various open source software projects” (paid for by
Google). The project needs to provide mentors for the students - who may
never have participated in an open source project before, so mentoring
includes not just understanding the code base, but understanding IRC /
mailing lists / version control / submitting patches etc - and the goal
is for the students to contribute actual working code to the project.

For those who are skeptical that students can get up to speed and
actually contribute something during a single summer in an area as
wonderfully strange as ours, please note that projects such as "Biblios"
began as a Google Summer of Code project.

Projects can apply beginning February 28th, 2011; the application
deadline is March 11; projects are notified about whether they're
eligible on March 18th.

Putting together a good application requires some effort, but the
pay-off could be high… not just for the code produced during the summer,
but by getting one or more potential Evergreen developers in the
community.

Ideas for possible projects include (but are not limited to!):
  * Some of our post-2.0 planning topics (rewrite the OPAC (in fast,
lightweight, buzzword-friendly HTML5?); move to Dojo 1.5+)
  * Enable external authentication methods like LDAP/OpenID
  * Rewrite Perl code in C where performance blockers are identified
  * Write Ruby / PHP / other OpenSRF clients and pertinent Evergreen classes like
Fieldmapper
  * Add OpenSRF-over-HTTP as an option to Perl / Python / Java
  * Write an Android client for Evergreen (this work is actually already
underway as a class project at Purdue, believe it or not)

If we wrap up our Conservancy agreement before the application deadline,
that might help simplify some of the financial details and avoid any
questions about what organization needs to deal with that overhead.

Special guest Chris Cormack dropped by to discuss his experience as a
Google Summer of Code mentor; in short, the timing doesn't work well for
New Zealand because students are in school during North America's
summer, and the bulk of the work is in the application and evaluation
paperwork, but he recommended it as worthwhile for North Americans.

So, do we have available, willing, able mentors from the development
community?
  * Dan Scott volunteered to mentor
  * Jeff Godin semi-volunteered to mentor, availability to be determined
  * ...

If we have ideas (there's no lack of available coding projects, in my
opinion!) and we have willing mentors (we need some help there), do we
have volunteers to create an application for the Google Summer of Code?