Google Summer Of Code Mentoring Application

wiki

Have at it!

MatthewBurke

• Describe your organization.

The Lua community comprises the language authors (http://www.lua.org/authors.html), developers who use Lua for their own applications (http://www.lua.org/uses.html), and users who take advantage of the standalone scripting abilities of the language. Most of the active development comes in the form of third party libraries and developing new techniques for using the existing facilities of the language. Due to the breadth of focus in the community there are a range of active and open projects that students can become involved in. These projects range from web development frameworks to open source video game engines written entirely in Lua.

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

Over the course of the past two years, there has been a surge in the popularity of Lua, and its more widespread adoption is evident by its promotion to the top 20 languages in the Tiobe Index (http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html). As the language grows more popular there is a constant need for more bindings to third party libraries, as well as projects written solely in Lua. Google Summer of Code 2008 is a great opportunity to expose students to open source software development by creating real solutions to fill existing needs.

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

No.

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

N/A.

• Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.

Jim Whitehead II (account information will be submitted with application)

• What license(s) does your project use?

MIT License.

• What is the URL for your ideas page?

http://lua-users.org/wiki/GoogleSummerOfCodeIdeas

• What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?

Details available at http://www.lua.org/lua-l.html

• What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

irc://irc.freenode.net/lua

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

Students should list their proposals on http://lua-users.org/wiki/GoogleSummerOfCodeProposals [GoogleSummerOfCodeProposals], using the format specified.

Also should list items we want from students: name, email, school attending, experience, letter of reference?...

• Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.

Matthew Burke

• Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.

Mentors please email jnwhiteh with your Google Account username

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

• What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Our first strategy is to work hard to insure that students don't disappear. The two most important factors in keeping students involved in their projects are frequent communication between mentor and student, particularly at the beginning of the project, encouraging communication between the student and others in the Lua community, monitoring students' progress so they do not flounder when they run into difficulty, and structuring the project so that the time between achievable milestones is short.

• What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

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

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

The ideas are all things that the community would actually use, if they are correctly implemented, so I think the ego boost of seeing your code get actual use would encourage the students to not abandon the project. -- FabioMascarenhas