Google Summer of Code Application
Since the application to Google's Summer of Code cannot be edited once it has been submitted, a copy of the questions asked in the application form is presented here for public scrunity.
About Your Organization
1. What is your Organization's Name?
- OpenCV - Open Source Computer Vision Library
2. What is your Organization's Homepage?
3. Describe your organization.
The OpenCV was initially developed by intel and has been in the open source domain since 2002. While at first all developers active on the SourceForge project were intel engineers or former intel employees, over the last years, a broader community with multiple developers from academia, spread over the world and across operating systems, has gathered. In 2006 the project community released version 1.0 of the library in a collaborative effort.
4. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?
- Since 2002 when intel first released the library as open source, a Linux port and python wrappers with interfaces to numpy and PIL have been added by the community. In 2006, intel added a machine learning module, and the 1.0 release was finished. In 2007 Mac OS X support was added - again by the community. The dependency on other open source libraries with unstable APIs (like ffmpeg for video IO) and general bit rot require constant work. Additionally, a new release version is planned for 2008. The participation in GSoC will give new impulses and probably draw additional attention to the project. This is especially true since most OpenCV users come from research and academia in computer science - a group that is likely to participate in GSoC.
5. Did your organization participate in previous GSoC years? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects. (optional)
- no
6. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (optional)
- no
7. What license does your project use?
- Intel License Agreement (modified BSD license)
8. URL for your ideas page
9. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
10. Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?
- #opencv on freenode
11. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. (optional)
- no
12. 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)
About Your Mentors
13. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
- We asked for volunteers on the developer list. Since only some of the recently most active and reliable developers responded no further criteria were employed. However, all mentors are known to be highly motivated and skilled slave drivers.
14. 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)
- nils (point) hasler (a) gmail com,mark (tod) asbach (ad) googlemail com,rstanchak (thingy) gmail com
About The Program
15. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
- Once they are gone there isn't really a lot we can do. However, by continuously keeping in touch with the students we hope to ensure that problems can be detected and worked on timely. Hopefully, this strategy will ensure that the students do not loose motivation and fade away in the first place. Additionally, by acquiring students' full contact details including instant messaging up front they will have a hard time disappearing anyways...
16. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
- Hopefully, there will be more mentors than students so that we can replace any mentors that go missing. Otherwise the remaining mentors will have to work a bit harder. However, the chosen mentors are known in the community and would loose significant amounts of karma should they leave.
17. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
- In order to accustom the students to the main development mailing list at least parts of the communication will be conducted publicly. The students will also be asked to write short status reports for public consumption when they have reached a point where they can check in new functionality.
18. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
- This is hard to ensure. Hopefully, the student's experience will have been positive and fueled by community recognition and the joy of creating something useful they will continue to contribute.