Below are the questions which need to be answered for the Mentoring Organization Application.
The application is due between 3 March and 12 March. Have at it!
PS I think we can leave the Google account information off of this page and just include it when we send in the application.
This application is being developed by the organizing committee of the annual Tcl/Tk conference, although we welcome and encourage participation by any member of the Tcl/Tk community. The people involved in this application include members of the Tcl/Tk core team, developers from some of the most well-established Tcl/Tk projects, and educators.
and therefore...
Tcl/Tk is one of the most mature of the dynamic languages. Tcl/Tk is an excellent example of a software project that has stayed true to its roots while adapting to new opportunities presented by increases in hardware power and increased development experience of its users (I don't like that last phrase---better wording?). We feel Tcl/Tk is a powerful tool to use for developing software in many application areas, presents an interesting and inspired set of language features, and is quite fun to use! By participating in GSoC we hope to accomplish three things: entice students into experiencing Tcl/Tk and becoming involved in the Tcl/Tk community, provide students the opportunity to develop software that will actually get used, and scratch various itches we have not yet had the resources to attack.
Acceptance of our application will have a large impact on the open source world both because Tcl/Tk is used by a range of governmental and industrial organizations and because of the number of large and influential software systems developed in Tcl/Tk including Expect and ???
No.
No.
Tcl/Tk is licensed under the Tcl/Tk license (http://tcl.tk/software/tcltk/license.html ), a BSD-like license. Individual projects included with this application may have different open source licenses as indicated in the project descriptions.
The steering committee for the Tcl language is the Tcl Core Group. That mailing list is housed at SourceForge: [email protected]
The main channel is #tcl on freenode. The freenode chat is mirrored to/from the groupchat at [email protected]
CF is checking, but someone who knows is welcome to correct this.
Students should use the application template available at GSoc 2008 Student Application.
Your name here!
First, they must be enthusiastic about the project they are mentoring. Second, they must be knowledgeable about Tcl/Tk. Third, they must be skillful about mentoring/working with others. For each potential mentor, we looked at previous involvement in the Tcl/Tk community, a demonstrable record of delivering projects and YYY.
The two most important factors in keeping students involved in their project are frequent communication between mentor and student (and between student and others in the Tcl/Tk community), monitoring their progress so students do not flounder when they run into difficulty, and structuring the project so that the time between achievable milestones is short.
Can we request that a professor at their institution be an adjunct Mentor of some sort? I'm not sure that this will help. But what might be worthwhile is to ask for references from a professor (or HS teacher since some applicants might be rising freshmen.
We specify a backup Mentor with each project included in our application. In addition, we have identified a pool of professionals with suitable teaching, CS and Tcl internals knowledge to be tapped if both Mentor and Backup fail.
The Tcl community is quite open, friendly, and easy to get along with.
The ability to code in Tcl provides a leg up in several non-programming careers like chip design, telecommunications, engineering, etc.
Second, we will schedule several irc-based presentation sessions throughout the time period...
We will offer an opportunity to make a presentation and submit a paper at the annual conference to successful projects
We will offer an opportunity to receive a second award for "Best Student Paper" at the conference.
First, we expect successful projects are likely to be included in commercial and/or open source offerings. Therefore students will ..
Second, we will use the portion of the funds that go the mentoring organization in order to fund the students' attendance at the Tcl/Tk Conference in October. In addition, successful students will be offered a publication credit for writing up their work for the annual Tcl/Tk conference.