Application details from Feb 2022

GSoC 2022 Application details from Feb 2022

This pad helps to improve the answers and information the XSF Org Admin plans to add to the Google Dashboard questions. It consist of the profile section and the questionnaire. If you place edits, please add you author name in a way that we can reach out to you if we have questions.

We have sometime until the deadline end of February, but I would like to get this done as soon as possible.

FYI https://opensource.com/article/21/12/virtual-mentorship-open-source

     https://opensource.com/article/21/12/open-source-stories
     https://opensource.com/article/20/4/open-source-community-management

Organization Profile

Describe the organization's mission. This is often the only thing a participant will read about your org, be sure to make it clear and concise. 50 characters maximum.

XSF develops an open-standard messaging protocol

Year of project creation: 2001 Primary Open Source License: GPL3 Link to your source code location: https://github.com/xsf/xeps

• Organization Categories

Select which categories fit your organization best. You may select up to 2 categories. This helps GSoC contributors filter the large list of organizations by their interests.

- Infrastructure and cloud - Social and communication

--> I vote for End user application as no server software has signed up with tasks (yet)

• Organization Technologies

Enter up to 5 keywords for the primary specific technologies your organization uses. Examples: Python, Javascript, MySQL, Hadoop, OpenGL, Arduino

XMPP, Go, Java, JavaScript, Vala

• Organization Topics

Enter keywords for general topics that describe your organization. Examples: Robotics, Cloud, Graphics, Web, etc. Select up to 5.

Instant Messaging, Jingle, WebRTC, Real-Time Communication, Chat

• Organization Description

Describe what it is your organization does. This information will also be included in the archive once the program has ended.

The XMPP Standards Foundation (XSF) is an independent, nonprofit standards development organization with the mission to build an open, secure, feature-rich, federated infrastructure for real-time communication and collaboration over the Internet.

We seek to achieve that goal by developing the world’s best open protocols for instant messaging, presence, and other forms of near-real-time communication, based on the IETF’s Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP). By “best” we mean simplest, most extensible, most powerful, most secure. Moreover, we value freedom, openness, and good technical design.

• Contributor Guidance

Provide your potential contributors with a page containing tips on how to write a successful proposal for your organization. Let them know what you want included, how you want it structured, and how to best get in touch. Examples.

In addition to writing a proposal, engagement with the actual projects before the application is very important. Showing motivation by taking interest in the project and communicating with the mentors is very advantageous. Solving a typical small problem can show that a student is serious with their plans.

Of course, a good proposal is fine, too. We would be interested in the motivation behind the application. Additionally, the student's background, the possible experiences and preferred technologies, the outcome of a preliminary research on the protocol and codesbases the student might work on. Furthermore, their own perspective on how the collaboration and organization through the Google Summer of Code with the mentors should look like and a review of which possible problems may be faced are also helpful.

Furthermore we recommend a bit of research on online guides to write a proposal or motivational letter. The official guidelines of the Google Summer of Code 2022 are highly recommened to read first.

Organization Questionnaire

• Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code? (2022)

The last two years were as in few other ways before another push into digital transition for many people, especially people who used to have little contact with digital technologies before. The software solutions, especially in terms of communication have shown many issues in terms of usability and data protection but also dependency on very specific software applications, with no alternatives. The XMPP Community has, in at least two cases, brought significant support to cope with the pandemic situation. Such as fast delivery software contributions such as upgrade of government software to place it under free license access and also vaccination information bots as in-chat solution to users. We think that this community should be further supported and one chance to achieve this could be the participation at the Google Summer of Code 2022.

Moreover, there have been very positive experiences in previous Google Summer of Code events and also students could be motivated to become long-term supporters. In the Google Summer of Code 2022, as the XMPP Standards Foundation, we would like to support further development of XMPP software applications and enhance communication in a federated network for the needs of the coming years. We believe that every user should be able to simply communicate with others but at the same time have the choice of software and not be reliant on a single solution. In that way we support client, server but also library software in many programming languages and formats.

As in the previous times, the XSF intents to act again as GSoC umbrella organization for XMPP related projects.

• What would your organization consider to be a successful GSoC program? (2022)

A successful GSoC program consists of three elements. First, there is a lasting motivation for open-source software. The organization members participating should, if not already, understand advantages of open-source software development and in the future continue their choice of engagement or career within this environment. As others do, we think that "open-source" is not only a license but also a future-proof mindset for development. Second, all participants, member or mentor, should improve not only their learning's in coding but also documentation, exchange and communication within a software development project. Third, and finally, that the participants should continue their engagement in the same organization or even software project they contributed to during the summer and a long-term engagement will form.

• How will you keep mentors engaged with their students? (2022)

In general, we provide several channels to communicate with the organization, mentors and the community. As this organization and the project provide chat tools, we recommend to use them for communication. But of course there are also email and videocall communication options, if preferred. See also the answer in the next section.

• How will you help your students stay on schedule to complete their projects? (2022)

Developing and reviewing clear tasks, goals and expectations has already been started with the interested potential project (developers) as part of this application preparation and will be continued with students of course. To connect often, the plan is during the Summer to have weekly meetings and review sessions will be organized by the Organization Admin. The setting will be offered in the XSF public GSoC planning group chat, everyone is invited to follow the progress. The students will be briefed to work full-time or in the agreed part-time setup to not jeopardize their goals with other activities. Of course, the code and development branches are hosted publicly to enable reviews and insights at any time.

• How will you get your students involved in your community during GSoC? (2022)

As previously state all progress will be public to the community, the same applies to the weekly meetings. But there are also mailing lists and other public chats available for example. Furthermore, we will ask the participants to write blog posts on their progress. To support this, we offer the official XMPP Standards Foundation's blog page.

All publications will also be announced in the XMPP Newsletters, which have several thousand followers up to today. The Google Summer of Code 2022 event has been promoted already since last year to involve the XMPP community.

While we will do our best to create a nice working atmosphere during the GSoC 2022 (and in general), we hope the students will learn and appreciate the variety of XMPP technology cross-platform applications, development of a standard and in general a wide and diverse community across many real-time communication topics. By this, we think a nice and thriving culture for future collaboration, that has been there for a long time, will positively affect newcomers and make them comfortable to stay in an environment, which supports study, development and exchange of technological knowledge for their future career. There are also future community activities such as development sprints, the option to have public talks in front of a tech-savvy community at the XSF office hours but also writing and publishing of insights.

Finally, the target is to merge the code before the GSoC will end, so they can become the go-to experts in their implementation and possibly continue their work from there.

• Anything else? (2022)