BeagleBoard/GSoC/Application

Applying to Google Summer of Code

Borrowed from http://sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/SL_application. See http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code/wiki/AdviceforMentors for more advice. To learn to navigate the actual Google Summer of Code website, see http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2010/userguide.

How does a mentoring organization apply?
The organization should choose a single administrator to submit its application via the GSoC web app before March 11, 2010.


 * Jason Kridner will be the administrator, but is looking for volunteers to help edit the application contents and to update the ideas.

Organization Name
BeagleBoard.org

Description
BeagleBoard.org is a volunteer community behind building powerful and open ARM-based systems based on the same processors used is in popular high-end Android phones today. The vision is to enable much lower-power and lower-cost computing platforms that can be embedded into designs with confined spaces, limited batteries and innovative user interfaces (web browsers available in every situation). The design is "open source hardware" with all of the schematic, bill-of-materials, layout, etc. shared for building other devices. The software is open source generated by the community, such as the Angstrom Distribution, Ubuntu, Android and other Linux distributions. Compiler tools are free and the board is available at a low cost--free to any student participating in a BeagleBoard.org related GSoC project.

Texas Instruments sponsors some BeagleBoard.org related activities and the first members of the community were TI employees, but the collaboration base is now over 3,500 members on the mailing list, over 20,000 individual developers having purchased development hardware around the world, and the IRC channel typically has over 150 developers on-line at any given time. Existing projects are often for the purpose of building robots, autonomous flying drones, automotive entertainment and navigation systems, home media centers, digital signs, wearable computers or gaming consoles and include versions of Android, Ubuntu, Angstrom, Gentoo, FFmpeg, XBMC, ROS, OpenCV and much more (with over 200 projects registered at http://beagleboard.org/project).

Home page
http://beagleboard.org/

Main Organization License
GPLv2

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?
We hope to grow our base of developers interested in embedded and heterogeneous multi-core software development environments that provide long-term power and performance advantages over the limited use cases of desktop and existing mobile computers. We hope to enable those developers to apply the core components running on the BeagleBoard to take computing into more environments and with new environmental interactions.

Beyond the basic technology issues, we hope to create better versions of popular open source applications for the low-cost/low-power platform and the ARM, C6000, and SGX processors contained within it. Because the BeagleBoard is open source hardware, software designed on it can be taken and put in entirely new products.

If accepted, would this be your first year participating in GSoC?
No

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
Yes. Students advanced the state of the XBMC media center application on ARM, OpenCV using heterogeneous processing systems, FFTs on ARM, pulse width modulation under Linux, compilation and invocation of heterogeneous processor functions under Linux and USB bus analysis under Linux.

We had an excellent set of mentors with 3 mentors for every student to ensure high availability of mentor time via the IRC channel. Our mentors had deep knowledge relevant to the projects and were able to assist the students in each of their technical challenges. We monitored student progress with weekly blog posts and IRC meetings to keep them on track and resolve any blocking issues. We collected short video presentations introducing each project, giving observers a good idea of the students' goals. We screened out projects that wouldn't provide sufficiently reusable software for the rest of the community.

We had some challenges shipping hardware to students on a timely basis and them getting charged taxes upon receipt, but we have plans in place to make it run smoother this year by getting local TI or other company offices involved. Getting local business offices involved would also enable a bit more face-to-face interaction as we can also invite local mentors to local meet-ups at those offices. Not all the code was directly adopted by the upstream projects and made available across the BeagleBoard community. Integration into a distribution will be a requirement this time to help with making the software more available to the BeagleBoard community and greater emphasis will be given on following up with upstream developers. More focus will be given to projects directly impacting the BeagleBoard community, rather than relying on upstream projects that might not be fundamentally motivated to adopt the patches.

If your organization participated in past GSoCs, please let us know the ratio of students passing to students allocated, e.g. 2006: 3/6 for 3 out of 6 students passed in 2006.
2010: 6/6

What is the URL for your ideas page?
http://elinux.org/BeagleBoard/GSoC/Ideas

===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 2011. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use.===
 * http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard: All things BeagleBoard
 * http://groups.google.com/group/beagleboard-gsoc: GSoC-specific things for BeagleBoard.org

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
irc.freeenode.net #beagle

===Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. Please note that it is a very good idea to ask students to provide you with their contact information as part of your template. Their contact details will not be shared with you automatically via the GSoC 2011 site.=== About you


 * 1) What is your name?
 * 2) What is your email address?
 * 3) What is your eLinux wiki username?
 * 4) What is your IRC nickname?
 * 5) What is the name of your School and in what country?
 * 6) What is your primary language? (We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.)
 * 7) Where are you located, and what hours do you tend to work? (We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.)
 * 8) Have you participated in an open-source project before? If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects, or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in open-source. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer?

About your project


 * 1) What is the name of your project?
 * 2) Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? For whom are you making it, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?
 * 3) What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is about 11 weeks long; tell us what you will be working on each week.
 * 4) Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences, credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant. Provide references such as professors who know your work if you like. Please feel free to visit our IRC channel, #beagle on irc.freenode.net, and ask for help.

You and the community


 * 1) If your project is successfully completed, what will its impact be on the BeagleBoard.org community? Consider who will use it and how it will save them effort. Give 3 answers, each 1-3 paragraphs in length. The first one should be yours. The other two should be answers received from feedback of members of the BeagleBoard.org community, at least one of whom should be a BeagleBoard.org GSoC mentor. Provide email contact information for non-GSoC mentors.
 * 2) What will you do if you get stuck on your project and your mentor isn't around?

Miscellaneous

a fork of the http://gitorious.org/beagleboard-validation/gsoc git tree. Provide here any instructions required for invoking it. You are welcome to test it on an ARM QEMU environment. Please feel free to visit our IRC channel, #beagle on irc.freenode.net, and ask for help.
 * 1) Please create a statically-linked ARM Linux "hello world" style executable that prints out your name and the date. Add your binary to a fork of to the
 * 1) Is there anything else we should have asked you?

What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible
Mentors were chosen based on personal knowledge of their contributions over IRC helping community members, the mailing list, and specific projects of interest.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
We will set the expectation that students will not be out of communication for more than 60 hours (ie, the length of a weekend) without prior notification to their mentor. We'll also hold mandatory weekly meetings in IRC for all the students to report on progress made, problems encountered, and proposed next steps.

All mentors are expected to review the SoC wiki and review the best practice sections. The project administrators will monitor all the projects and try to identify issues that might lead to disappearing contributors before the problem becomes unsolvable. (This applies to the next few answers also)

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
TI-based mentors will have work-oriented commitments. We will choose non-TI-based mentors with a history of being involved in BeagleBoard.org projects and who are consistently responsive via IRC and e-mail. We plan to have secondary (paired mentors) and tertiary (general IRC channel) support for each project, and mentors will also be expected to attend the weekly check-in meetings on IRC. We will have a named contact in the same region and/or company as any mentor to assist in "pinging" any AWOL mentor.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
We encourage candidates to interact with community members on the IRC channel and mailing list ahead of the program to gather information required for their application. We will work with the students to produce YouTube videos to introduce their projects to the community. Weekly blog post updates put into the community general RSS feed during and after the program help keep the community informed. Students are encouraged to hang out on #beagle which is active roughly 24/7 during the program and we continue to see students remain from last year. We will give them hardware and swag following the program to keep them interested.

If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here.
===If you are a large organization who is vouching for a small organization applying to GSoC for their first time this year, please list their name and why you think they'd be good candidates for GSoC here:===

Backup Admin (Link ID)

 * Cathy Wicks 

What criteria do you use to select the members of your group? Please be as specific as possible.
Membership in the BeagleBoard.org community is open to all interested parties. Since this community is based on a common interest in a particular piece of hardware, there are no specific requirements for membership. Many community members are also members of specific open source projects, such as OpenEmbedded and GNU Radio. Other community members use and enhance existing open source software to develop innovative mobile applications using the Beagle Board.

What license(s) does your project use?
For code written for this project, we will use GPLv2. When the project is based on an existing open source package, the license of that package will be used.

Existing code is primarily GPLv2 and all kernel code should be so. Some developers use other FOSS licenses, such as MIT, LGPL, etc. There are some TI codecs available for use on the platform that are provided under publicly-available binary-only licenses as well as other binary firmware builds distributed as part of the Linux kernel, but these are discouraged from being used as part of any student project.

What steps will you take to encourage contributors to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
We understand that it is difficult for new people to start using the existing project mailing lists and irc channel, so we will create a specific Summer of Code email list and irc channel. Potential mentors will use these paths to work with students to develop ideas and project proposals. In at least one case, potential mentors have an existing relationship with some students, they will work directly with this group to prepare proposals. We understand that the preferred communication channels are the BeagleBoard.org lists and irc channel, during the Community Bonding Period we will introduce students to the these communication channels.

During the Community Bonding Period we will supply students with Beagle Boards and help them setup development environments.

Once we have accepted proposals, we will continue to use these resources, and develop additional communication paths as required.

After the project, we plan to support students with successful projects in any wrap up work needed, such as submitting code to the upstream project.

What will you do to ensure that your accepted contributors stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
Although we will start by using SoC specific communication paths, all students will be expected to monitor the primary email list and irc channel. Over the course of the summer students will be encouraged to start using the primary communication channels to work on their project. By transitioning students to the primary communication channels, we hope to integrate students into the larger community prior to the end of the summer of code.

Link ID
BeagleBoard

Public Email
beagleboard@googlegroups.com