Mentoring Organization Application to Google Summer of Code 2010
- Organization Name
- Akara project
- Description
Just copied from Akara
- Home page
- Main Organization License
- Apache 2
Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2010? What do you hope to gain by participating?
The Akara project is open source distilled from many commercial engagements. So far its primary contributors have been people whose "itch" to be scratched has remained fairly concordant to client need. But the project is designed to be broader than its most well-trodden paths, and in order to more effectively serve a broader community, it needs some injection of broader perspective.
We are hoping that students and mentors can work to improve relatively neglected parts of the project such as more general-purpose test suites, additional demo modules, and support for key emerging technologies such as OpenSearch and PubSubHubBub.
What is the URL for your ideas page?
http://wiki.xml3k.org/Akara/Ideas/GSoC
What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for GSoC 2010. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use.
General, for users: http://groups.google.com/group/akara
For developers: http://groups.google.com/group/akara-dev
What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use?
Student Personal Details
- Full name:
- Preferred email address for contact
- Location (approximate is fine)
Student background information
- What are you studying?
- How much time do you realistically intend to spend on SoC per week?
- What do you hope to gain from the project?
- Have you contributed to Open Source before?
- Do you have any example code you can share?
- In what programming languages have you worked?
- What other related experience can you share?
Project
- Please describe the project you'd like to undertake for Akara. You may take on one of the provided ideas, or come up with your own.
- Please outline the schedule you intend for the project, including a few possible milestones
- Please discuss areas of your background that you expect to be suited to the project
What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible:
Individuals who are strong developers in the key languages (e.g. Python and C), and who have the engineering wherewithal to provide broad direction and support. Individuals who are proven contributors to the Akara project, or to 4Suite.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
We plan to encourage frequent communication throughout the project, via wiki, e-mail and IRC. We'll ask each student to maintain a public mercurial branch, and ask the mentor to check for updates according to the schedule provided by the student in the app template. This will at least provide early warning of a problem, and allow us to take measures to contact the student, and to avoid loss of work in the worst case.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
We plan for each project to have at least one backup mentor to be cced in correspondence with the primary, ready to take over if the primary mentor drops out.
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
We plan to encourage frequent communication throughout the project, via wiki, e-mail and IRC. We'll ask each student to maintain a public mercurial branch, and encourage the community to provide code-review (with a bias against unkind comments). After the program, we shall make an effort to update the student with the use of his or her project in citeable work, as a live wire to staying involved.
What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
After the program, we shall make an effort to update the student with the use of his or her project in citeable work, as a live wire to staying involved. We shall also offer to students whose work warrants it consideration in additional internships related to continuing the SoC project.
Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team?
4Suite and its successor Akara have been active projects since 1998, and in addition to the success in themselves as projects have spawned additional work and influence in numerous other areas, for example serving as the core XML processing toolkit for Red Hat and Fedora Core distributions in the mid 2000s, contributing components to the Python language, and the separate uriparser RFC 3986 URI parsing library, to name a few cases.
4Suite and Akara have provided several important innovations, including:
- XML/RDF triggered transforms (helped inspire GRDDL)
- Path-based RDF query mounted across an XML/RDF repository (Versa, which inspired many others, and was an input to W3C's SPARQL work)
- Rules-based (rather than type-systems-based) data binding for XML and RDF
- RDF query within XSLT
- Push-style data-driven multiple dispatch to code
- Pioneering implementations of DOM, XPath, XSLT, XLink, XPointer, RELAX NG, Schematron and more
Working on Akara is a certain way to give the student a boost in credentials in data architecture and modern enterprise information systems, without being too "enterprisey".
Akara is focused on making it easier for developers to process data-driven applications the right way, and as such are not intrinsically sexy, but have opened up new vistas in projects for Library of Congress, Minnesota Historical Society, DowJones, ThomsonReuters, Elsevier, Lilly, Quintiles Transnational and more. In all cases Akara developers have acted as ambassadors for open source in these organizations, encouraging contributions for the broader community. Akara has been an unseen engine for open-systems in data processing for years. SoC participation in Akara is certain to garner the student ongoing, referenceable acknowledgment in contribution to prominent projects for making the world a better place.