[Gaim-devel] OpenWengo Code Break, participation proposal

[Julien G. <jul...@we...>]

Hello everyone,

I'm Julien Gilli, OpenWengo ( http://www.openwengo.org/ ) community's
coordinator. OpenWengo would like to sponsor students to work on
"Communication over IP" projects during this summer. "OpenWengo Code Break"
is the temporary name for this initiative, before we find a better one.
OpenWengo Code Break will be pretty similar to Google Summer of Code, but
much smaller. We plan to have approximatively 8 students sponsored to work
on various FOSS projects related to communication over ip in general.

Although we use Gaim's code in our main client software sucessfully, I don't
know the Gaim community quite well. So please feel free to point out if i'm
mistaken in some of the things I may state later in this e-mail. The purpose
of OpenWengo Code Break is to help the FOSS community at large, so we don't
want to do anything that could hurt a given project in some way.

In our humble opinion, Gaim is one of major Communication over IP FOSS
projects, and we'd love to get some students working on it. We have several
ideas in mind, like:
 * implement QQ protocol in gaim (It's not implemented AFAIK, but I may be
wrong).
 * modifying gaim so that it's possible to extract an easily reusable
dynamic library from its source code by building a make target (kind of
producing a gaim SDK).
 * update protocol revisions for already supported protocols.

I don't know if these ideas make sense. In any case, you are more than
welcome to submit your own ideas if you're interested to participate in this
program. The basic rules, still to be finalized depending on the amount of
feedback we get from projects, would be the following:
 * students work from beginning of July until the end of August.
 * mentors, ideally developers being significant contributors for the
project being worked on, assist students during this period.
 * students get paid half of the prize in the middle of summer, and get the
rest at the end of the program, for a total of approximatively 3500 euros).
 * mentors get 500 euros if they successfully assist students to work on the
project.

We'll set up an FAQ and web pages on openwengo.org as soon as we are sure
enough FOSS projects are willing to participate. In any case, feel free to
post any question you may want to ask, and i'll answer them if I can.

We'd like to start the program pretty quickly: we'll try to accept students
applications at the end of next week. We know it's quite short for mentors
and projects to work on subject ideas proposals, but I think that if you
have interesting ideas in mind, it can be of great help to the Gaim project.

If you interested in participating in such a program, please write your
subject ideas in response to this thread, and say if you'd like to be the
mentor for this subject or mention someone else that would likely sucess in
mentoring the student working on the given subject. Hopefully, this thread
will get some positive feedback and we'll choose one or two subjects for
student(s) to work on.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Best regards,
-- 
Julien Gilli