GSoC2017
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.