GSoC2017
We were successfully chosen by Google to participate in their Summer of Code 2017 program.
Our listing can be found here.
Application
Mentors for 2017:
- Bertl
- Alex
- Sebastian
- Andrej
- Malte
Idea Page:
https://lab.apertus.org/project/view/20/
Why does your organization want to participate in GSoC? (1000 Characters)
Apertus Association supports and nurtures the creation and distribution of knowledge whilst also seeking to establish and promote networks that benefit from open source technologies across the audiovisual media production, industrial vision, computer vision and digital cinema spheres of interest. Thus far, and to our knowledge, we’re the only organisation in this field underpinned by the open source ethos. Because of this there remains an entire culture consisting millions of creative individuals around the world who are trapped, or indeed who find themselves excluded, by proprietary protocols embedded inside existing technologies relevant to filmmaking processes. The projects which we’re helping to pioneer would undoubtedly make visual storytelling accessible to a far greater number of people worldwide, and our participating in GSoC will help to shake-up an industry that’s so far been dominated by a small number of companies for a very long time.
How will you keep your mentors engaged with students? (1000 Characters)
Mentors are long term team members, most with academic tech lecturing experience. Mentors will convene with students briefly on a daily basis via email/IRC (day’s goals, next steps and progress reporting) Mentors are asked to hold a weekly appraisal with students on IRC, taking time to outline progress, goals, tasks, challenges and work time estimates for the coming week. We hold wider Team IRC meetings every 14 days. Mentors, students, team and community members typically discuss progress, goals and next steps. Separate, weekly, mentor specific feedback meetings inside our organization to deliberate on how best individual mentors can continue helping students. We also endeavour to invite mentors from other GSoC orgs to exchange insight/experience/support to these meetings. Mentors will be readily available on IRC for most of every day. In the event that a mentor becomes unavailable for whatever reason, and as a precaution, we will assign a backup mentor for each student/project.
How will you help your students stay on schedule to complete their projects? (1000 Characters)
We ask students to present their progress and goals in the public IRC team meetings every 14 days, during which progress reports and ideas are typically exchanged between team and community members. Mentors are asked to remind students to give estimates how many hours they think individual tasks will take to complete (also to train the students in taking a step back from coding and valuing and estimating their work and resource). We will provide mentors with forms/templates to make planning as methodical as possible. Predefined milestones should be laid out before work starts but it should also be clearly communicated to mentors, and between mentors and students, that work is iterative and interactive and things are expected to change or evolve. Students work should be about exploring and experimenting with different approaches as opposed to just ticking off items on a list.
How will you get your students involved in the community during GSoC?(1000 Characters)
Students will be made to feel welcomed as part of our community, included in our development mailing lists, invited to IRC channel discussions (we will provide IRC accounts that remain in the channel after a student logs-off so that they can browse/answer any backlog), linked to our project forums, and given a tour of our task management system (https://lab.apertus.org/) - mentors are asked to utilize this task management system with the students for tracking task progress, discussions and code commits together. If possible we’d very much like to meet with students and introduce them to other team members in person. Visiting our offices would be something that we’d encourage. Overall we’re very keen to help students progress and improve so mentors will undoubtedly make answering questions and working through any problems with them a priority.
How will you get your students involved in the community after GSoC?(1000 Characters)
Regular contribution throughout GSoC will be met with praise and encouragement. Periodically we will make it clear to students that they would be welcome to stay with us and continue contributing beyond the completion of a sponsored tenure. Naturally, students/developers will be invited to the same meetings and workgroups as they had been participating in during GSoC. Mentors are keen to continue supporting individuals involved in the project by helping to bring any ideas regarding the potential for improvement to fruition. We’d like team members to feel assured that they’re able to influence project direction. We’d also like to encourage students to gravitate towards mentoring too. It’s a great project and we’re confident that students who work alongside us will want to participate in helping it to grow.
Students Application instructions (1500 Characters)
Please provide a brief CV.
In your application please include answers to the following questions:
What interests you most about the apertus° AXIOM project? What interests you outside of academic studies? Do you have any long term goals? ie. Do you have any specific objectives that you’d like to accomplish over the next three to eight years? Please tell us about your greatest work-related achievement. As mentors and project coordinators, how can we get the best out of you? Is there anything that you’ll be studying or working on whilst working alongside us? If you were asked what would you like to improve upon, what would your answer be? Are there any techniques and tools which you use to keep yourself organized?
Once you’ve selected a project assignment from the ideas page, please include a well-defined, weekly schedule with clear milestones and deliverables around it. Alternatively, if you want to propose your own idea then please include outline, goals, and a well-defined weekly schedule with clear milestones and deliverables.