Organization Name:
Drupal
Description:
Drupal is a web content management system and web application framework written in PHP. It is also a vibrant, growing, and fun community of programmers, activists and communicators. The core Drupal software is a framework to power community driven web site software, and includes features such as internationalization, tagging, and an extensive roles and permissions system. The highly extensible architecture supports well over a thousand sub-projects in the form of contributed modules and themes, so there's something here for everyone.
Home page:
http://drupal.org
Main Organization License:
GPL v2
Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating?
GSoC has repeatedly resulted in attracting and retaining some of our most dedicated contributors, and we aim to repeat these successes for yet another year.
Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
Drupal has been involved with GSoC since the beginning. Many of our students have gone on to become immersed in the Drupal community, taking on key roles within the project, working full-time with Drupal development and consulting shops, and/or graduating to GSoC mentors and admins in subsequent years. Our project failure rate has been consistently low, although we have taken steps to reduce this even further by growing our team of administrators, mentors, and other volunteers for 2009.
One notable success has been Angie Byron (aka webchick), who is now a core maintainer of the Drupal project, who participated in GSoC 2005 and stayed on board with us all the way through.
If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006.
Last year, we had 21/20: we had a bonus student join us
If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
N/A
What is the URL for your ideas page?
http://drupal.org/node/740322
What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2010. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use.
http://lists.drupal.org/listinfo/development
What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
irc.freenode.net/#drupal
Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2010 site.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/55448
What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible:
Each of these individuals is a past successful GSoC mentor, a well-known figure in the community, has been met in person by the GSoC administration team, or some combination of all three. Traits we specifically look for in mentors are overall knowledge level, project management skills, demonstrated ability to share information with others, patience and etiquette with newcomers, and availability of time over the summer. We also chose mentors with a wide range of skills, so that we will be prepared to take on a diverse set of projects should the need arise.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
We focus on preventative measures, including having some simple tasks students can complete during the "get to know the community" period: http://drupal.org/project/issues/search?issue_tags=Novice. The students will promote their projects throughout the life of GSoC, and are to blog weekly about the progress of their GSoC projects. We also track CVS commits and activity on related Drupal.org Web sites. By monitoring both social and "code" contributions by students we are well equipped to find disappearing students before they actually disappear.
However, at the first sign of lack of communication, our first recourse will be to talk one-on-one with the individual. Students can be shy, and scared to ask questions for fear of feeling "stupid," and we understand that this happens and will do our best to reach out and encourage them. However, if it becomes a chronic problem, students will be informed that they will not receive mid-term (or final) payments unless the behavior changes.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
We also require regular check-ins from our GSoC mentors, both to ensure that they feel their student is on track, but also to make sure that they're still out there and actively engaged. Additionally, each GSoC project is assigned a secondary mentor who can field questions and take over in case the primary mentor becomes unavailable. We also have a large body of community members who've signed up to help with more general code reviews and imparting advice about who to contact, what resources to seek, etc. which will help mentors focus on the things that only they can do.
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
Before the program, as mentioned above, we have a pool of community members not associated with any particular project who will induct students into community processes such as groups, the issue queue, development list, IRC, CVS, how to create patches, and so on. We will also be introducing the students early on to the DROP program (analogous to GHOP), where they can cut their teeth on some bite-sized tasks before launching into full GSoC mode.
During the program, all GSoC projects will have an official project at drupal.org/project which provides a permanent place for the code to live, as well as an issue queue. This equips students with the same tools as the existing "Drupal rockstars" and also results in free publicity for the projects each time they're used, for the hundreds of people who follow various issue/commit trackers. During the program, we will also have frequent status updates to the community about GSoC's progress, in order to help raise the profile of GSoC projects.
What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
The biggest thing we can do here is get as many other community members as possible interested and invested in our students' projects, so that students feel a sense of ownership and pride in their work and thus see ongoing maintenance as a joy rather than a chore. Our large body of community members will shift from "intro mode" to "review mode" early on in the GSoC development cycle, to help engage the students.
GSoC experience also goes a long way on a resumé in our community, and we will work with interested students to help them land Drupal jobs after school, and coordinate with industry partners who may want to further invest in these projects after GSoC ends.
Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team?
We'd just like to thank you guys so much for all the work you've put into the past few years - we've got some truly amazing results. And, we're SUPER excited for this year!