GSoC 2011 Scribus Team Application

=Questions:=
 * 1) Organization Name: 	(required)
 * 2) Description:	(required)
 * 3) Home page:	(required)
 * 4) Main Organization License:	(required)
 * 5) Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?	(required)
 * 6) Did your  organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your  involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.  (required)
 * 7) 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.	(required). Add a  Comment (optional):
 * 8) If your organization has not previously  participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what  year(s)? 	(required)
 * 9) What is the URL for your ideas page?	 (required)
 * 10) 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. 	 (required)
 * 11) What is the main IRC channel for your organization?  	(required). Add a Comment (optional):
 * 12) 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. 	(required).
 * 13) What criteria  did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your  organization? Please be as specific as possible: 	(required)
 * 14)  What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? 	(required)
 * 15) What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? 	(required)
 * 16) What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program? 	(required)
 * 17) What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes? 	(required)
 * 18) Is there anything  else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program  administration team? : 	(required). Add a Comment (optional):
 * 19)  Backup Admin (Link ID):

=Answers:=

Organization Name:

 * The Scribus Team

Description:

 * The Scribus Team includes the core development group and a large circle of code, translation, testing, and user support contributors located on every continent who cooperate to develop Scribus. Scribus is now a 10 year old project which began as a Linux-only program, but now offers versions for Windows, MacOSX, and some less-commonly used environments like OS/2. Scribus provides professional publishing features, such as color separations, ICC color management, versatile PDF creation and pre-flight verification, as well as a Python scripting engine. In the Linux/UNIX and OS/2 worlds, Scribus is the only professional-grade Open Source Desktop Publishing Software, and on Win32 and Mac OS X, Scribus is used by an ever increasing number of professional, as well as demanding amateur users. One can get some idea of the quality of PDFs made with Scribus, as well as the breadth of use by checking some of our Scribus Success Stories: http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Success_stories.

Home page:

 * http://www.scribus.net

Main Organization License:

 * GPLv2 or later

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?

 * Desktop Publishing is a very complex process that requires a well-designed workflow with its pinnacle  being the layout software. This complexity is reflected in the  commercial market dominated by two software companies with no interest  in platforms other than Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X that are often  not responsive to customer input. Without Scribus there would be no Open Source desktop layout on alternative platforms, and the ability of  people in the developing world and users of Free Software to produce  professional level documents would not exist. Impressively, Scribus grew  out of its humble beginnings as an application for making restaurant  menus into a professional level piece of software that rivals products  with huge budgets and large vendors behind them. However, because  of the variety and high complexity of DTP workflows and the capacity limitations of  the development team, the development of Scribus is targeted to the  areas with the highest return for our users, whose input is invaluable.  What we end up with is a series of plans for tackling known existing issues, and also a variety of feature requests (http://bugs.scribus.net/roadmap_page.php). While some of these are large projects, there is quite a range of items for students to choose from, depending on their interest and expertise. GSoC is an important way for us to attract developmental resources to address a variety of useful smaller projects, while allowing participating students to  gain valuable experience of designing and coding solutions, and in particular understand how collaborative open source projects work. The dynamic of  Scribus development is such that there is a constant feedback loop  between many of our users, including professional ones, and the  development team. This means that GSoC student participants will get support and advice from top-notch DTP and pre-press professionals, as  well as our entire core team, not just their assigned mentors. It's hard to know what it takes to attract good talent to projects where the main incentive is working together on collaborative software development to produce something which you give away for free, but we are grateful for the opportunities that GSoC offers to find these talented programmers.

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your  participation.

 * We participated in GSoC 2007, 2008, and 2009. Our GSoC 2007 participants added math formula editing support via LaTeX  frames – and a basic imposition (booklet printing) plugin.  Both projects were completed successfully. GSoC 2008 brought in a new  generation Python scripter, versatile vector and bitmap import via  UniConvertor and GraphicsMagick, and a well-polished picture browser.  GSoC 2009 work added PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-4 export and improved the PDF  embedding functionality.

A measure of our success is the fact that two of our GSoC students joined our team and another one became a contributor. In 2007 we went through the learning curve without major problems while learning a lot about selecting  students, managing mentor-student communications and expectations, and  finding problems before they turn into major obstacles. This allowed us to streamline the GSoC 2008 selection and mentoring processes and achieve a 100% success rate in our second year.

In 2009, our efficient process organization allowed us to quickly identify  the gaps between students' credentials presented during the selection  process and their ability to communicate and produce results once the  projects started. We quickly culled projects with no hope of successful completion and prevented waste of GSoC funds whereas the student who was  open to communication and problem resolution received all the help  needed for successful completion of their project.

Our challenges throughout those three years were consistently related to the  students' communication difficulties and students lack of planning and  appreciation for the complexity of the GSoC projects. In one case, time was lost due to a student's withdrawal when confronted with coding  problems. In another case, two the students had problems connecting with their mentors on IRC due to the time differences and network access  difficulties, but they were able to switch to email and to use it in a  productive manner in conjunction with the use of subversion branches. Fortunately, we had a supporting infrastructure that helped continue the flow of code and reviews. In 2009, two of our students did not make us aware of their school commitments that effectively made them drop out of  GSoC as they were not able to commit sufficient resources to their  projects. A third student had to cancel GSoC due to a serious family-related issue. Although we are not sure, we suspect these issues contributed to the failure of any application approvals in 2010.

For GSoC 2011, we plan to strenuously focus on student selection prior to the actual applications. It seems to some extent that the notoriety of GSoC has led to larger numbers of students who are failing to grasp the commitments they are making, and we realize it is our responsiblity to get this message across.

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.

 * 2007: 2/2, 2008: 3/3, 2009: 1/4.

If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

 * n/a

What is the URL for your ideas page?

 * http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/GSoC_2011_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://lists.scribus.info/mailman/listinfo/scribus is used for user support and community discussions. We also set up GSoC-specific lists  http://lists.scribus.info/mailman/listinfo/gsoc-announce and  http://lists.scribus.info/mailman/listinfo/gsoc. Prospective students are encouraged to contact us as described in  http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/GSoC_2011_Contact_Information.
 * http://lists.scribus.info/mailman/listinfo/scribus-dev.

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

 * #scribus on FreeNode. We also use #scribus-dev for more specific development-related  discussions.

==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.==
 * We have very specific and stringent requirements listed at  http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GSoC_2011_Student_Requirements that  supersede our previous use of an application template.

What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible:

 * All of our mentors are members of the core Scribus development team. Beside the familiarity with Scribus code they possess other qualities that are useful for successful development of this type of software:
 * Familiarity and experience with the prepress technologies;
 * Knowledge of the existing open source technologies applied to desktop publishing;
 * Experience in mentoring junior coders, possibly from an academic environment;
 * In-depth knowledge of user requirements.

We have selected for the mentoring team only those of our development team who would be able to dedicate sufficient time and efforts to mentoring of GSoC students and have excellent communication abilities. We also work on creating mentor-student pairs that will be passionate about the project and have excellent communication and willingness to work together to overcome any difficulties that might arise in the process. Moreover, we are confident that we have sufficient overlap in codebase knowledge and willingness to support each other among our mentors to be able to provide seamless support for our students. There is also a more widespread feedback that students get from contact on IRC and the scribus-dev mailing list.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

 * We are tightening up the monitoring and feedback that we expect from our students. Contact with a mentor twice weekly will be considered a bare minimum, anything less than that results in negative feedback (warnings about only weekly contact, for example). We also expect students to adhere to their weekly plan, and we expect explanations or sensible changes when this doesn't happen. Our mentors will keep in touch with students and perform at least weekly  reviews of the students' work via email reports and IRC discussions. We  will strongly encourage students to practice continuous involvement in the activity on our IRC channel and mailing list, and will make sure this is understood as a tacit requirement. There are explicit requirements for uploading interim working code so that progress can be assessed. A responsibility of each mentor will be to make sure that exceptions to expected performance are explained and corrected.  In the most unfortunate case – when a student might actually disappear – we plan to  contact the second runner-up candidate to see if he or she would like to  continue the project, or we will fold the project into our main  development plan and ask Google to withhold the final payment from the  student who has disappeared.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

 * We have yet to see that happen, one of the strengths we see in our project. Certainly, one of our mentors might become ill or need to step away from the project due to personal matters, and in this case we do not anticipate any problem with another stepping in to take over. In addition, open  monitoring of the student's progress via our public mailing list and IRC  channel and subversion commits will allow the rest of our team to keep  watch on the GSoC progression. We do realize that the assigned mentor is primarily responsible for ensuring continued student compliance with their GSoC contract.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

 * Community participation is a hard requirement this year. We do not intend to select any students who do not show that they are willing and able to communicate with our team and with the Scribus Community. We conduct much of our development discussion on IRC and ask students to be present there as much as possible. Over the years we have found that the open and friendly atmosphere characteristic of our mailing list and IRC channels has helped a number of people make a transition from Scribus users to contributors and to team members. We believe that by exposing students to this friendly and encouraging environment we can foster their sense of involvement and help them see how their accomplishments help the entire community as much as being rewarding learning experiences for themselves. The absence of interpersonal conflicts given the large number of contributors to our communication channels and rapid pace of development shows that this strategy has been productive.

What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?

 * We realize that in some respects, DTP is a niche type of software. What we see from users unfamiliar with the existence of DTP software is often great surprise that Scribus exists, and continuing surprise of what it can do. What we can hope for is that some of our students have this same surprise, and want to stay on once they become familiar with interesting issues still needing to be addressed. What we can do is what we've always done, try to be helpful to users and potential team members, offering what assistance we can to help them find their place in the Scribus community. As noted above, we have already had some success in attracting students to stay on after GSoC.

Is there anything else you would like to tell the Google Summer of Code program administration team?

 * Having a nurturing and friendly environment for our developers to work in is part of the essence of Scribus. Without a doubt GSoC helps us find a wider audience with developers wanting to contribute to open source software development, and we would like to continue to be involved year after year. Thank you for giving us these opportunities.

Backup Admin (Link ID):

 * mrdocs