Wanmen 2014 Summer of Code Mentoring Organization Proposal

1. Describe your organization
2. Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2014? What do you hope to gain by participating?
3. Has your organization participated in past Google Summer of Codes? (yes/no)
4. If you answered “yes” to the question above, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.
5. If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
6. What Open Source Initiative approved license(s) does your project use?
7. What is the URL for your Ideas list?
8. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
9. What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
10. Who will be your backup organization administrator?
11. What criteria did you use to select the mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
12. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? Please be as specific as possible.
13. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
14. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project’s community before, during and after the program?Before During After
15. Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.
16. Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here.
17. What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

1.Describe your organization. Wanmen is an open university aiming to provide low entrance university level education to the general public in China. Founded by a young physics scholar, Tong Zhe in the year 2012 , Wanmen stands itself as a non profitable education institute to deliver university level knowledge. We believe that every one can become their own teacher through self-study.

Wanmen Developer Team is a volunteer-led technical team having strong social responsibilities. Started coding in May 2013, Wanmen Developer Team has initiated several education oriented technical projects, including Schrödinger's cat(CATS in short, Wanmen’s content management system), Dirac sea(SEA in short, Wanmen’s collaborative learning system), Klein bottle(BOTTLE in short, Wanmen’s front end stylesheets).

Most projects are hosted on Github to encourage the spirit of open sourced programming as knowledge sharing is also a strong culture in Wanmen.

2. Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2014? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We hope to attract student developers to join Wanmen and make projects to influence the online higher education.

We plan to add more features and upgrade two existed systems in the summer. Many tasks can be implemented in google summer of code project. New developers would be very helpful in implementing these plans.

3. Has your organization participated in past Google Summer of Codes? (yes/no) No

4. If you answered “yes” to the question above, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.

5. If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? Not yet.

6. What Open Source Initiative approved license(s) does your project use? Wanmen is licenced under the Apache License, Version 2.0

7. What is the URL for your Ideas list? https://github.com/wanmen/gsoc/idea.md

8. What is the main development mailing list for your organization? https://github.com/wanmen/gsoc/mail.md

9. What is the main IRC channel for your organization? #wanmen on irc.freenode.net

10. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Shaohuan Li, shaohuan.li AT gmail.com

11. What criteria did you use to select the mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

Previously Google Summer of Code students or mentors. Active contributors of Wanmen who have strong technical background will also be included.

12. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students? Please be as specific as possible.

We will firstly choose reliable students, such as previous GSOC students. We have asked a few previous GSOC students, some of them are interested. If possible, we can meet them in person. We will work with them regularly on github repositories to check the progress.

We will have at least one meeting per week with every student. To keep them in mailing list as well as social networks. In case of disappearing, we will also try to find them on social networks.

13. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

Wanmen’s developers are very connected. Most developers keep connections via Google Talk and they are mostly online. We will keep the developers updated with the progress. In a rare case one mentor disappears, we can quickly assign another mentor.

14. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project’s community before, during and after the program? Before

Students are encouraged to ask questions to the Wanmen team. They can interact via Google Group, IRC, mailing lists,etc. Students are also encouraged to report issues in the Github repository and fix problems on the existed project.

During

Mailing lists, Google handouts and IRC will be our main communication channels. Mentors will have weekly meeting with students. We also want them to maintain a weekly blogpost to log their progresses and learnings.

After

Wanmen developers are encouraged to send pull requests for code review before merging. Developers in the mailing lists will be notified for the code review. Developers can review their old codes when there are issues. Wanmen developers are also encouraged to come up with their own idea to make great impacts on online education. They can get other developers supports to help make the ideas into reality.

15. Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here. No

16. Are you an established or larger organization who would like to vouch for a new organization applying this year? If so, please list their name(s) here. No.

17. What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

We will try to make the learning process enjoyable and knowledgeable. In the project, we stick to principles of open source software development that aim at making newcomers feel comfortable. For instance, contributions by everyone goes through code review on the github pull requests. We also consider as an important objective of the Summer of Code projects, to merge the code written by students by the end of the project timeframe. By doing this we hope to make the experience satisfying to them, and prove that they can really make a difference working on an open source project.