Season of KDE: help wanted!

Jun 16, 2012 // by Teo // Amarok, Blog, GSoC, KDE // 2 Comments

Last weekend, after countless emails and weeks of digging through a huge Google spreadsheet, I have finalized Season of KDE selections. The KDE student programs team is confident that we have made the best possible choices and matched as many students as possible with competent mentors.

KDE student programs by the numbers

Congratulations and a big welcome to all the students who have been accepted for Season of KDE 2012!

This year we had almost 70 applicants. We found a mentor for 29 of them, and they will spend their summer hacking on KDE. Unfortunately, mentor availability was tight, so we had to say no to quite a few excellent submissions.

I’m not complaining though, this year KDE got more Google Summer of Code students than ever before, and more Season of KDE students than ever before (total headcount: 89). It’s going to be an awesome summer!

Help wanted: web application developers and artists

It is clear that KDE student programs as a whole are growing, and we have reached the point where a single Google spreadsheet as a tool for all administrative tasks concerning Season of KDE simply does not scale. The sheer amount of submissions (and therefore, data), combined with the size of the KDE community (and therefore, mentors to contact) has resulted in the Season of KDE 2012 selection period taking more than a month!

The current “spreadsheet+bunch of emails” workflow is definitely unsustainable, and the KDE student programs team agrees that a web application like Melange would help tremendously in managing Season of KDE more efficiently. Melange would probably be overkill though, and we have not managed to find any existing solution that would fit our requirements. Those requirements are quite simple: a web application with simple CRUD database operations that would allow the following:

3 categories of users, students, mentors and administrators can sign up, ideally through identity.kde.org;
students can submit one or more applications for a currently active student program (e.g. Season of KDE);
mentors can view submissions and declare their will to mentor one or more students;
administrators can assign student-mentor matches, manage deadlines and properties of a student (active/inactive, shirt sent/not sent, etc.);
mentors can pass or fail students with a simple yes/no switch (no need for questionnaires like in Melange).

Lydia Pintscher has drawn up a nice representation of the workflow we would like to have:

Sayak Banerjee has already started working on it, so we are hoping it could be ready for next year’s Season of KDE. If you wish to help, feel free to contact sayakb on #kde-www on Freenode.

We could also use a nice logo for Season of KDE, if you have drawing skills and would like to help contact the KDE student programs team at kde-soc-mentor-owner@kde.org.

Share this:

Digg

Tags: Amarok, GSoC, KDE, SoK, students

2 Comments

Christopher Antila 16/06/2012 at 19:03

I’m not sure if you already saw this, but the 2010 Fedora Summer Coding program had a student accepted to develop just this type of application. Looks like it’s hosted on GitHub, and it’s certainly not *just* ready for KDE use, but here…

https://github.com/reddragon/fsoc

Reply
- Teo 16/06/2012 at 21:23
  
  Thanks for the pointer, I’ll be sure to check it out
  
  Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Comment

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

Blog Categories

KDE
Amarok
GSoC

Tweets

Apple is why we can't have nice things. apple.slashdot.org/story/12/07/03… #BoycottApple 16 hours ago
RT @tomahawk: New BIG release(s)… Tomahawk 0.5 and a new Toma.hk are here! Come and get 'em! blog.tomahawk-player.org/post/256241634… 1 week ago
RT @Falkvinge: INTA recommends a REJECTION of #ACTA, rejecting the attempt to postpone by a 19-12 vote! WE WON! 1 week ago
@VladaRH @alexbilusic @yOy0dEv @MeFierce Dokaz da vlasnici nisu dali informirani pristanak: forum.hr/showpost.php?p… 2 weeks ago
@yOy0dEv @VladaRH @alexbilusic @teo_m @MeFierce Nemojmo buniti eutanaziju sa ubojstvom. Ovo nije bila eutanazija jer psi nisu bili u mukama. 2 weeks ago

Google+ Activity

It might not be a flying car, but while we wait for it this really looks like the next best thing :) -- 1 week ago
<3 zucchini pie! With sesame seeds on top! -- 1 week ago
This is Fortuna.
She was adopted from a dog shelter into a loving family a few months ago. Like more than fifty other dogs, Fortuna did not have rabies. Along with fifty other dogs, Fortuna was murdered. She was killed by the veterinary inspection in her home, with her family watching, because of alleged rabies risk. Testing after her death confirmed she never carried the rabies virus.
Dog caretakers in Croatia, beware! Remember that you have a constitutional right to not allow anybody, with any kind of badge or paper or convincing story into your home, unless they have a court warrant.
Family members of victims should contact Prijatelji Zivotinja at prijatelji.zivotinja@inet.hr or 060 44 66 44 for information on how to join the lawsuit. -- 2 weeks ago

Dropbox referral link

Dropbox is a cloud storage platform, I have been using it for quite a while to share course material with my students and to synchronize data between my computers.
If you get a free Dropbox account through this link we both get 500MB extra storage for free!

Subscribe to this blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page or responsible
for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.

gipoco.com is neither affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its contents. This is a safe-cache copy of the original web site.