Privly GSOC 2013 Application

Organization id

privly

Organization name

Privly

Organization description

The Privly Foundation is a US non-profit dedicated to empowering the Privly community to participate in and contribute to online privacy projects. Privly's core software began as research at Oregon State University and has since matured into a generalized approach to adding privacy and security to any website. The board of directors includes individuals from web security and open source research, as well as open source industry. The Privly Foundation's funding originates from an initial crowdfunding round completed in 2012. Privly's donors come from more than 20 countries, and technical contributors to the Privly project hail from the United States, Germany, India, and Australia.

Organization home page url

http://privly.org

Main organization license

MIT License

Veteran/New

New

Backup Admin

smcgregor

If you chose "veteran" in the dropbown above, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.

N/A

If you chose "new" in the dropdown above, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

We have not applied in the past.

Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2013? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We are applying to participate because the GSOC is a great way to increase Privly's developer base while providing newcomers with a welcoming project. We hope to further develop our mentoring skills, and gain more developers.

What is the URL for your Ideas list?

https://github.com/privly/privly-organization/wiki/Ideas

What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

[email protected]

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

irc.freenode.net #privly

What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible.

We are recruiting experienced Privly contributors - both developers and domain experts, to serve as mentors this year. We will assign two mentors to every project - a primary technical mentor (an experienced Privly developer) and a backup who may be a domain expert or another technical resource - which helps balance the time commitment required to be able to effectively contribute.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

We have been learning from Sahana, a previously successful GSOC mentoring organization. We share a board member with Sahana, and we hope that their insight will help Privly to be a successful mentoring organization. Since it is best not to invent new control procedures, we are using much or Sahana's Creative Commons licensed GSOC material.

We will be sure to document the expectations for the students prior to their involvement in GSOC. We will require that students check in with us via IRC/email/mailing list at least once per week. Therefore, we should know early on if we are losing touch with them, or if they need more guidance and help. Our sincere goal is to prevent student disappearance by keeping contact with them regularly, and providing welcoming, helpful guidance to help students catch up with their work.

In the event that we do not hear from students, we will email them personally re-engage them. If we don't hear from the student for 2 weeks, we will send them a warning of their failure to meet our requirements for participation in GSOC. In the event that our interventions fail to bring the students back to active status, we will look to the GSOC program office for guidance.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

One of our main mentors is the lead developer of Privly. He is also a board member. It is highly unlikely that he will disappear. Our other main technical mentor is a committed Privly developer. If we on-board any new mentors, we will ensure that they are aware of our expectations prior to mentoring. Furthermore, each project/student will have two mentors (a main mentor to provide technical advice and on-boarding help, and a backup mentor to provide domain specific advice). This will ensure some amount of redundancy.

Along with weekly updates from students, we will require weekly updates from mentors. Similar to students, we will be able to detect any lack of participation at an early stage. Each of our mentors has a passion for the project, and for helping students succeed. In the event that we do not hear from mentors, the lead developer and myself will ensure that the students are supported through the duration of GSOC. If need be, we will on-board new mentors and allow for our other board members to have a more central role in mentoring.

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

To promote our GSOC program, we will post to our three mailing lists, English and German language Twitter accounts, Facebook and Google+ pages, and ask several affiliated projects whether we may post to their mailing list. Before GSOC, we ask that students submit a bug report to Privly. We will work them to find a bug, and learn how their existing skills could be applied to our project.

During GSOC, we will keep in touch with the students via IRC/mailing list/emails. We will require one weekly formal update from the students, but we expect to have much more frequent interaction with them. Many of our developers idle on IRC, so we are in almost constant contact with those who are on the IRC channel.

Currently with Privly, we block out weekly work-sessions, where developers (mentors) give their full and undivided attention to working on Privly, answering questions, and planning for the next week. We plan to continue this routine during GSOC. The students can join us during this work session via IRC.

What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

We will continue to invite the students to our weekly Privly work-sessions. Also, our projects should be feasible to complete in the summer, but they are part of a larger component. They will be able to apply the skills they learned during GSOC to continue work after the summer. As an organization welcoming to newcomers, we hope to encourage continuing participation, and for previous GSOC-ers to become mentors for GSOC-ers in years to come.

Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.

[confidential]

Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here.

[confidential]