Google Summer of Code 2009

Greetings, Shaoxuan, Rachel, Herve, Myriam, and Anthony,

Congratulations on your acceptance into the Google Summer of Code 2009 program!   We are looking forward to your work on the Hackystat project this summer, and are excited to see what you come up with.  This page provides information on how we want to organize and manage your involvement.   If you have any questions, please ask.

Timeline

• May 23: Official start date

• July 13: Midterm evaluations
• Aug 17: Official 'pencils down' date.
  
• Aug 24: Final evaluations

While you are not obligated to start work before May 23, we hope that you will spend the next few weeks thinking about your project and communicating with us about any ideas or questions you have.  Which brings us to the most important topic:

The success of your GSoC project basically depends on three things: your talent, your time, and your ability to communicate regularly and effectively.  Based upon your project proposal, we know you have talent.  Based upon your answers to our email query, we also know you have time.  That means that the success of your GSoC project really only depends upon a single thing:  your ability to communicate regularly and effectively.  Here's what we'd like you to do:

1. Establish a GSoC blog and provide a status report once a week on Monday.

You can either create a stand-alone blog for just your GSoC project, or else use a pre-existing blog and add a "GSoC" tag to the appropriate entry and/or put [GSoC] in the title so we can distinguish these entries from others.  Your weekly GSoC status entry should generally be a few paragraphs long, and should contain: (a) a description of what you've accomplished during the prior week; (b) how many hours (roughly) you worked during the prior week; (c) what you intend to accomplish during the upcoming week; (d) pointers to any recently updated work products of interest; and (e) any other stuff (questions, comments, pointers to cool web pages, etc.)

I recognize that there will be probably be one or two weeks during the summer where you are sick, or your "real life" catches up with you, or for whatever reason you just didn't accomplish much on GSoC.  If that happens, don't cover up.  Just note in your blog entry that this was an off week for you, and move on.

Robert Brewer, a Ph.D. student in CSDL, maintains a blog that provides an excellent example of this style of status posting.

2. Use the hackystat-dev mailing list for non-"status update" project information.

Some of you have been emailing me with thoughts about your project, which is great, but I want you to start sending these "idea" emails to hackystat-dev.  The reason is simple: There are a lot of smart people that read this mailing list, and I want you to benefit from their reactions as well.   The hackystat-dev mailing list is a very friendly place so you shouldn't feel inhibited about posting there.

3. Send me private email about GSoC administrative matters.

If you're having problems with GSoC administration, such as payments, t-shirts, etc. or any other non-public issue then email me directly and I'll do my best to help you out.

4. Prefer Google Project Hosting for your code, design documents, etc.

The Hackystat Project uses Google Project Hosting, and the project itself is distributed among 30 or so different Google Projects.  In general, we prefer that you create a google project to store all of your project documents and code.  This makes it easiest for us to collaborate with you and to integrate your project into the Hackystat ecosystem.  If there is some reason you would like to use another repository, please let me know.

5. Send me a photo.

You are now cordially invited to join the venerable ranks of the Hackystat Hackers!  If you accept this invitation, please send me a photo (sunglasses required!) for inclusion on the web page.  (Your "biography" will be created by a secret committee of current Hackystat Hackers.)