GSoC at 52°North for Students and Contributors

Main Page: GSoC

Basics

"Flip bits, not burgers."

Important steps for students:

• Read the GSoC FAQs and the student/contributor guide. Seriously, read it! If you do not read it then you will not know how to present yourself in a way that any project would accept you.
• Go to the GSoC2024ProjectIdeas and see if your find a project that interests you.
• Solve the code challenge for you project. Important: Submitting the code challenge does not suffice as an application.
  • Important: Solving the coding challenge is actually the first step you have to achive.
  • Please start with the coding challenge before you ask questions about the outcome of the coding challenge (!). Many questions are resolved automatically in the course of processing.
  • Please include your solution to the coding challenge in your proposal.
• Use the application template below to create your application and submit it on time. For any general questions, writing to the official GSoC mailing lists is strongly preferred because all students can profit from your questions. Feel free to contact mentors at 52°North directly with any specific questions to a project or use gsoc-52n@52north.org.
• The 52°North licensing model requires you to sign a contributors license agreement to collect usage rights (you keep your copyright). This means no disadvantage to you at all! It just makes sure your contributions can become part of a long-term software development.

Preparing for an application

Apart from the guidelines linked above (read them!) you can show your capabilities in general, your interest in a particular project idea, and your qualifications as a software developer by doing the following:

• Check your eligibility by carefully reading the programme's rules.
• Check the timeline of the entire GSoC period and if it fits your personal agenda.
• If you want to ask questions about projects and project ideas, feel free to contact mentors at 52°North directly with any specific questions to a project or use gsoc-52n@52north.org.
• If the project extends an existing software, download and install the software, get acquainted. If it is a web service, try to make yours publically available. If not, send us screenshots of your local deployment. Ask a very precise question to a potential mentor - good developers have and appreciate an eye for detail. See if there are open bugs you can fix or small features to implement - contact the code manager for details.
• Send us a link to your GitHub user account.

These things are very important if you want to make a great impression.

Application Template

Please use the following template if you want to participate in GSoC with 52°North. If you need further information or have questions regarding the template please contact Ben and Benjamin (b.graeler@52north.org, b.pross@52north.org).

We are looking forward to your application!

To give you the freedom to provide a creative and persuasive application, we just ask you to please include the following contents in your application. You can also check out the examples in the GSoC student guide (Ex1, Ex2) for some hints. Please do not verbatim copy text from the ideas page, or from other people's discussions about your project, but rewrite it in your own words. If you include any significant text or code from another source in your application, it must be accompanied with a proper citation. All papers or references that you use or plan to use must also be cited. Put all this in a "References" section at the bottom of your application.

Personal Details

• Full name
• Country
• Contact details (email, personal website, Skype, IRC nick, phone number, location/time zone)
• University/School name and degree
• Short bio
• Why are you interested in open source

Project

• Description: Include a link to the description on the ideas page or make clear if this is your own suggestion. Also include potential mentors in the latter case.
• Preliminary Schedule (milestones and deliverables, planned working hours, and potential other commitments)
  Note: The mentors rely on you to create a first schedule, which will be revised during the project. The first schedule is there to demonstrate that you are able to create a reasonable first draft and can prioritize tasks.
• If you want to impress the mentors: include a Scrum backlog and a sprint schedule.
• Motivation (This might, but does not have to, include answers to questions such as: Why 52°North? Why this project? Why Open Source? Why are you suited to carry out the project?)
• Relation of project to ongoing studies (if applicable)
• Report on code challenge
• Do you understand this as a serious commitment equivalent to a full-time paid job? (Note: Since GSoC 2022 with different working hours the amount of time spent weekly may vary.)
• Do you have any known time conflicts in the coding period?
• After GSoC, you envision your involvement with 52°North will be: Over? Ongoing? Evolve into being a contributor or committer? Tell us what you envision your participation with the 52°North development community will be like after this year's GSoC comes to an end?

Experience

• (Open Source) software development experience (including example applications, GitHub references)
• Programming level
• Work experience
• Academic experience and performance
• References (software projects, advisors, teachers, colleagues, former mentors on Google Summer of Code)
  • Describe previous projects you worked on, including your own tasks if there were several committers!

Important: You have to submit your project proposal on the Google Summer of Code website. It is not sufficient to send an email to the mentors or any of the 52°North mailing lists.

A good proposal...

Check the following items with your proposal before submitting it, and submit it if you can say "yes" to most questions.

• Is my project description longer and more detailed than the one on the ideas page?
• Did I complete the programming challenge and describe my findings and results in the proposal?
• Do I use text formatting (links are hyperlinks, headlines bold) to make the text more readable?
• Do I use the correct names (e.g. "52°North", not "52 North", "the 52", ...) and pay attention to details?
• Do I include all the content suggested in the template, but still have my own style/partitioning to stand out?
• Does the proposal contain enough details to show that I understood the task and have the required skills (or that I am aware where I do not have them yet)?

During GSoC

Your end of the bargain

• Follow our internal GSoCGuidelines.
• Active communication with mentors and within the community (Slack, through GitHub issues and discussions or direct Email communication with mentors).
• Full time work on an interesting software development assignment.
• Weekly status reports.
• Two to three (depending on length of project) blog posts on your GSoC project (your own blog or at 52°North's blog)
• A lot of fun coding!

Our end of the bargain

• Mentors and org admins communicate respectfully with you and focus on your learning experience.
• Your mentors respond in a timely manner.
• The org administrators give support for organisational issues and in case a mentor cannot perform his duties.