About Your Organization

1. What is your Organization's Name?

   Plone Foundation
   

2. What is your Organization's Homepage?

   http://www.plone.org 
   

3. Describe your organization.

   The Plone Foundation will celebrate its fourth birthday around the time students start coding for this year's SoC.  It exists to promote Plone, an open source Content Management System based on Zope 2.  Plone has existed since 1999 when the project was founded by Alexander Limi, Alan Runyan and Vidar Andersen.  The foundation is adminstered by the foundation board which is elected by the foundation membership.  Foundation membership represents exceptional contribution to the community and is subject to approval of an application, so far over 100 have been accepted. 

   The community has had an annual conference since 2003 which has taken place in New Orleans, Vienna (twice), Seattle and Naples.  The Naples conference was attended by approximately 350 members of the community; a similar figure to the previous conference in Seattle.  Local user groups exist in many cities, some organising symposia; one such event is currently underway.  

   In addition, over 800 projects are versioned in our community SVN repository, the collective and there are more than 1000 showcase websites and almost 250 companies specialising in Plone development listed on Plone.net.
   

4. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2008? What do you hope to gain by participating?

   We aim to get new developers interested in Plone.  An open source movement is only as strong as its participants, SoC is a great way to get students who might normally not jump into things to be brought into the community.  If there's anything we can do to make things easier for new participants we'd love the opportunity.

   
   Not to mention the really cool projects that otherwise might ever not be implemented!
   

5. Did your organization participate in previous GSoC years? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects. (optional)

   Yes, in 2006 we were allocated 3 projects and in 2007 we were allocated 8.   In both years all but one of the slots was allocated to a project that finished successfully.  Of the seven completed last year, three have had an immediately more visible impact to end users of Plone.
   
   

   * Vice was started in the Summer of Code and is approaching its wide-scale release after multiple real-life deployments.  It is under consideration to be moved into the core of Plone. 
   
   * Quills was extant before SoC and currently powers many blogs in the community and is still under active development.  It is still evolving into newer development styles, but is likely the powerful blogging solution for Plone.
   
   * Genesis is not in wide use, but is of a standard that allows third party developers to use it for serious projects.  Vidar, the student responsible, has been involved in discussions on "Dexterity", a complimentary idea.
   
   These particular projects are merely the most visible, the other four offer deeper improvements to Plone core that are likely to have been neglected if it were not for Summer of Code.
   

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

   N/A
   

7. What license does your project use?

   GPL
   

8. URL for your ideas page

   http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-summer-of-code-2008/project-ideas
   

9. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

   https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plone-developers
   

10. Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?

    irc.freenode.net #plone    There is also a #plone-soc channel specifically for people interested in summer of code, which we indend to use throughout the project if accepted. 

11. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. (optional)

    No.
    

12. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please enter their Google Account address. We will email them to confirm, your organization will not become active until they respond. (optional)

    optilude@gmail.com

            
     

About Your Mentors

1. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

   Mentors were asked to volunteer.  Generally those that have are very well known in the community.  Those that volunteered were asked to answer the following questions:

    

   1) Have you mentored a student for SoC previously?  If so, who was it and what would you do differently?
   2) Have you read GNOME's guide to mentoring SoC students?  http://www.gnome.org/~federico/docs/summer-of-code-mentoring-howto/index.html
   3) Do you think you can meet the time requirements listed?  If not, how much time would you be able to dedicate to your student.
   4) How familiar are you with the zope3ish way of developing with interfaces, views and adapters?
   5) Are there any aspects of Plone functionality that you're more familiar with than others?
   6) Do you have any experience you feel is relevant?
   7) What's your Google account information?

    

   Reading the document in question 2 was a requirement.  Mentors that participated last year and whose students had favourable things to say were accepted.  Ability to develop for Plone was guaged in questions 4 and 5, but primarily self selecting on this matter.  The mentors are aware of ideas suggested and have begun to voice preferences on projects they feel able to mentor.

    

   Finally, we will only consider mentors who can devote enough time to their student.  Some mentors have already stated they plan to use the 10% Plone Manifesto offered by their companies to perform this work.  (The 10% Plone manifesto is a variant of Google's 20% time where 1 day every fortnight is dedicated to the community).  Active members of the community were considered preferable to relatively unknown people, as we know how much time they already put in.
   
   

2. Who will your mentors be? Please enter their Google Account address separated by commas. If your organization is accepted we will email each mentor to invite them to take part. (optional)
   

   Confirmed so far:
   matthew@matthewwilkes.co.uk , zopatista@gmail.com  , r.ritz@biologie.hu-berlin.de  , clark.alex@gmail.com  , daniel.nouri@gmail.com ,  sidnei.da.silva@gmail.com , dtremea@gmail.com , gsoc@cmscom.jp
   
   Four more people have joined our mentors mailing list but not yet completed the process listed above, yet more have expressed an interest in taking part but have yet committed.
   

About The Program

1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

   Mentors will be asked to organise regular catch-up time with their students, preferably also chatting to them on IRC (if that's their thing).  We'll encourage students to hang out in both the #plone and #plone-soc channels, the former to keep them involved in the community and the latter to build a sense of community within the SoC group themselves.

   
   Hopefully this will bring the students together and make them less likely not to mention if they're having trouble or will be incommunicado temporarily.  If a student does disappear, the mentor should give them some lee-way, they're not slaves after all, and contact them later.  Exact timelines will depend on the mentor/student dynamic.
   
   If the mentor is unsuccessful after another short period of time, he'll try again.  A third time and an administrator will contact them.  By this stage, if there's been no response the student will have been off the radar for well over 2 weeks.  The mentor will then write up what had been achieved to date, and we will officially contact Google to inform them of the problem.  If this happens over a payment date we will, of course, inform Google before the payment is made.
   

2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

   We will ask mentors to let us know in advance if possible of having to be out of touch.  If advance notice is not possible, they should as a minimum let the administrator and their student know the situation.  If a mentor is going to be unavailable for too long, another mentor will temporarily take over their duties.  Through use of the #plone-soc channel we will encourage students to feel comfortable chatting to any of the mentors, so hopefully this would mitigate the problem.

   
   Their fellow mentors would be made aware of the problem and would put pressure on the disappeared mentor to resurface.
   
   Project allocations will be discussed with the mentors to ensure they have the best fit to their interests.

   
   

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

   Primarily, we'll try to be as friendly as possible!  During the competition we will encourage all students to keep a blog for announcing how they're doing, and ensure they are syndicated onto planet.plone.org   Also, they will be encouraged to use IRC to communicate with the extant community members, many of whom will be easily excited by descriptions of progress.

   After the SoC, we will ensure the students are included in any relevant discussions, post news items on the website about their success, and talk to the 2008 conference organisers about the possibility of free admission that has been offered in the past.
   

   
   

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

   As above, we feel people will stick to a project if they have a friendly community backing them.