This was submitted to Google SOC application form 2007-03-06
1. Describe your organization.
The MoinMoin project is developing a popular wiki engine in Python.
Wikis are getting more and more important for the communication infrastructure of OSS groups all over the world. Especially groups like Apache, Ubuntu, Python, Debian, Fedora, Xen, KernelNewbies, linuxwiki.org (de), etc. are using MoinMoin to keep the contact going with their users and developers and for documentation.
We have some few long-time core developers, some more casual developers and quite many developers contributing plugin code. Additionally, many people work on the wikis improving documentation and translating it to about 25 languages.
2. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2007? What do you hope to gain by participating?
We hope to get some new people joining our development team, enjoying coding in Python, for free software and for the wiki way.
We hope to get some improved functionality for MoinMoin. Some stuff needs some dedicated developer working full time on it over a limited time to get it into a usable state - that is hard for most of our existing developers as they usually work on MoinMoin in their spare time and that way some stuff just takes too long.
3. Did your organization participate in GSoC 2005 or 2006? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects.
Yes, we participated in 2006 and really enjoyed it - it brought moin a big step forward.
We got 3 grants, 2 projects succeeded and the students delivered very good work (included in moin 1.6), 1 project failed (but we at least learned from that).
4. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
N/A
5. Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.
Thomas Waldmann, Account <tw-public AT gmx DOT de>
6. What license does your project use?
GPL
7. What is the URL for your ideas page?
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/GoogleSoc2007
8. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
We use the wiki for that. http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/
(We have a mailing list for user support, but it isn't used for development.)
9. What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
#moin on freenode (we also have #moin-dev for moin core development)
10. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/DeveloperApplicationTemplate
11. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.
Alexander Schremmer, Account <webmaster AT FOO alexanderweb DOT BAR de>
12. Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account Information.
Thomas Waldmann, Account <tw-public AT gmx DOT de>
Alexander Schremmer, Account <webmaster AT FOO alexanderweb DOT BAR de>
Florian Festi, Account <google AT NOT HERE festi DOT info>
13. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
These are moin developers volunteering to do it. They have good experience with the code and also experience with SOC.
14. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
We'll exchange as many contact information (phone, mail, irc) as feasable before and try to contact the disappeared student to find out what's going on.
We'll make clear before project start that we expect regular work (5d/w) and at least one daily commit as the rule.
If some student prefers being lazy, disappears regularly and fails to work on the project he has taken, he'll get some warnings and finally a negative report, if it didn't improve.
15. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
If he doesn't re-appear soon after, we'll get some other mentor.
16. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
We'll welcome them on the IRC channel and wiki and try to integrate them into the development team.
We are present on IRC and the wiki very much and we'll have a weekly fixed-time mandatory SOC meeting on irc, talking about progress last week, stoppers, todo next week.
We'll try to get the students to stay on our IRC channels as much as possible to communicate with them while they are working or planning stuff to work on.
17. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
I guess you can do nothing to "ensure" that, but we hope the students enjoy discussion and getting help from the community, using and hacking the software, coding in Python and the wiki way of collaboration.