GSoC 2010 Student Requirements

Scribus Team Requirements for student participation
Version:  Draft 1.0 - in progress.

All prospective students are required to read this page and agree to folow the guidelines below to be eligible for a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) application with The Scribus Team.

Before you apply

 * First of all, GSoC is a full-time job. Be ready to put in at least an equivalent amount of time over the duration of the program. If you have many upcoming exams at your school, are thinking of getting another part-time job or an extended vacation - please reconsider applying to GSoC. If you still want to do it you will have to be very explicit about your other obligations and take them into account when preparing your personal program timeline.
 * 'Communicate early, communicate often'. If we don't see you in #scribus or #scribus-dev on Freenode; you don't participate in scribus, scribus-dev, or gsoc mailing lists on scribus.info and we don't get to know you 'before' you apply - your chances of being selected for the program are minimal. Use [Contact information] for more information on your communication choices.

Your Application

 * You must have a comprehensive plan for all 12 weeks of GSoC. This plan must include your contingency plans for working around more difficult parts of the project should they prove to be too challenging, backup plans for recovering after an unforeseen absence, ways to reach you and your plans to communicate with you mentor and the rest of the Scribus Team. Preparing this plan will allow you to think ahead and have an outline that you can use to verify your progress. It will also help us monitor your performance, so we could help you when difficulties arise.
 * You must submit a patch that fixes one of the bugs or feature requests in the Scribus BTS - no matter how small or trivial the patch is. This will show that you have minimal proficiency using a BTS, patch, subversion, and have at least some idea about Scribus codebase. We are not asking for the world here - there are thousands of small fixes or improvements that can be done very easily.
 * Talk to the team and identify people or person most familiar with the area of the codebase that you will be interested in working on during GSoC. This will make it much easier for us to provide you with the best mentor and we'll be able to judge your communication skills in the process.
 * Get a gmail.com, a sourceforge.net, and wiki.scribus.net accounts as those are required for GSoC participation, access to our sourceforge subversion repository, and editing ideas and plans pages respectively.

GSoC Participation

 * Once you are accepted, we expect you to talk to you mentor via IRC or email at least twice a week. Once per week communication will result in a warning and a week or more of silence will result in an immediate termination of your participation unless prior arrangements were made with your mentor and the Scribus Team's GSoC administrators are aware of those. If you are falling behind on your schedule or are having any problems - talk to us immediately. Number one cause of GSoC failures is the lack of communication.
 * We would really like you to keep a blog about your progress as it would create a public record of your participation and provide a way for all interested people to keep track of your progress.
 * Keep your code in working order i.e. it should apply cleanly to your chosen Scribus svn branch, so Scribus developers could check your tree out and be able to build it. The code does 'not' have to be feature complete at any given time, but it must compile. This in turn requires that you develop some familiarity with subversion and cmake - the build tool we use. Don't worry - we are here to help you with any problems you might have while learning these tools.
 * 'Commit early, commit often'. We expect you to commit your work to subversion often, so there is a track of your work and interested people could comment on it and help you along. Remember - if it's not checked into a rcs (Revision Control System) - it does not exist.
 * Allocate enough time in your schedule to produce the final tarball for Google and write a final project report.

After GSoC

 * The main reason why Google runs GSoC year after year spending millions of US dollars on the program is to encourage continuing participation of students in open source project. The main reason Google and the Scribus Team want you participate in GSoC with us, so you might consider staying around and becoming a part of our team. Please keep that in mind throughout the project. Ask yourself if you like doing this, if you enjoy communicating with the Scribus Team and participating in the wider Scribus community. We'd love to see you a part of the Scribus world.