About Your Organization
- What is your Organization's Name?
- The X.Org Foundation
- What is your Organization's Homepage?
- Describe your organization.
- The X.Org Foundation supports development of the reference open source implementation of the X Window System.
- Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?
- The X Window System (exclusive of the toolkits and other high-level infrastructure supported by freedesktop.org) has an incredibly small developer community for such a large and central project. We think it is critical to recruit new developers into our community; Google Summer of Code is one way to do so. The code that is produced by Summer of Code students will be eagerly adopted whenever possible; more importantly, those students will be strongly encouraged to continue to participate in X development.
- Did your organization participate in GSoC 2005, 2006, or 2007? If so, please summarize your involvement and the sucesses and failures of your student projects. (optional)
- We participated in 2006 and 2007, with good success. We had four projects in server and infrastructure, with varying levels of completion. Some were resounding successes, while others were learning experiences.
- If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (optional)
- N/A
- What license does your project use?
- Predominantly the MIT/X license.
- URL for your ideas page
- What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
- Where 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. (optional)
X.Org-GSoC2008-Application is the starting point for students.
- Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please enter their Google Account address. We will email them to confirm, your organization will not become active until they respond. (optional)
- Matthieu Herrb, Egbert Eich
About Your Mentors
- What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
- Like last year, our mentors are self-selected from the developers actively working on key infrastructure in the X Window System. In their areas of specialty, these individuals are highly qualified to assist students in development tasks, and they can provide general evaluation for project proposals affecting most aspects of X.org development.
We currently have about a few mentors lined up. However, we are still obtaining gmail accounts for them.
- Who will your mentors be? Please enter their Google Account address separated by commas. If your organization is accepted we will email each mentor to invite them to take part. (optional)
About The Program
- What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
- All of the projects we are proposing for Summer of Code represent work that we are unlikely to be able to get done anytime soon without help, so no disruption of the X.Org work would occur. We sincerely hope that we will not lose any students, and will do what we can to maintain close contact with them. If a student disappears nonetheless, we will proceed on a case-by-case basis.
- What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
- We will accept only projects for which there is a clear sub-community that can mentor and participate with the student. If a mentor disappears, there should be plenty available to step in.
- What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
- Regular meetings via IRC. Regular email progress reports. Regular code check-ins and review. We can provide sponsorship for students to attend our conferences and events.
- What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
- See previous question. We want to make sure that we are doing more than hiring a student; we are gaining a new colleague. We have been successful in the past with this approach, and hope to be again this year.