Historical:GSOC 2011 Application

Describe your organization

Our organization is a composite of several open source/free software projects: hugin, panotools and enblend/enfuse. We are used to collaborate across timezones and cultures. We are purely meritocratic with no hierarchies, grant write access on our central repository very liberally, make decisions by consensus, are respectful of diversity and welcome all contributors.

Details in our community charter http://hugin.sourceforge.net/community/charter/

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?

We had excellent experiences in the past four years. As a team, we hope to gain new team members. As a Free software we hope to gain a few new mind blowing features. As a project we hope to gain visibility to attract more contributors and users beyond GSoC.

Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.

hugin/panotools participated in all GSoC since 2007. We consider this participation successful for both organization and students. Our projects were:

• list successful projects, maybe only select ones

Who will your organization administrator be? Please include Google Account information.

• Who's up for it? Can we do a job-share?

What license(s) does your project use?

Both hugin, enblend/enfuse, panotools and matchpoint use GPL v2 or above.

What is the URL for your ideas page?

http://wiki.panotools.org/GSOC_2011_Ideas

What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?

https://groups.google.com/forum/?pli=1#!forum/hugin-ptx or http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/panotools-devel

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

Do we have any?

Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.

http://wiki.panotools.org/GSOC_2011_Student_Application

Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.

?

Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.

Jim Watters

Jim is willing to be a mentor for projects that are more on the panotools side.

He is a Software Engineer at JFL Peripheral Solution, in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, where he designs software for scanners. An avid user of PanoTools since 2000. A growing contributer to the source code of PanoTools since Aug 2003 and a current maintainer of PanoTools. Before receiving his degree in Computer Software in 1999, he received a diploma of Fine Art in Photography in 1990.

Most recently his attention has been directed to creating Immersive Panoramic Video.

His google associated account is jwatters at photocreations.ca.

Mentor 2

Bio

What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

• Academic experience - most of them are or will very soon become PhD and have mentoring experience
• Hands on experience with our code
• Knowledge of the wider universe of code applied to produce stitched panoramas

Steering Committee

Do we have a steering committee in 2011?

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

The very first thing we'll do is making sure we pick the right students. Our estimations are going to be based on the following criteria:

• Students should be avid photographers;
• Students should be able to prove that their programmings skill match our request;
• Students should be able to prove that they have experience working with a mentor.

We are going to do our best to have them understand that GSoC is a both (close to) full time job and fun, so that they treat it with responsibility, but do not consider it a total boredom.

Next step is motivation.

The point of participating at GSoC for us is getting new contributors who bring innovation and stick to affiliated projects.

In case a student cannot deliver good enough results we are not going to drop all the work he managed to do and keep development at highest possible pace to make sure the community around affiliated project will not suffer in any way and any amount of money invested to the project by Google isn't completely lost.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

The selected mentors are well known and connected in the community. We estimate the risk of a disappearing mentor to be very low. To minimize the impact of such an unlikely event we strive to have several backup mentors who can replace others. In the event that one of the two mentors disappears, recruiting efforts for a backup mentor will start immediately. Our steering committee is well connected and will support the organizer in the efforts to recruit replacement mentors. Our community has already experienced the disappearing of key figures on important projects and survived the test when Helmut Dersch, founding father of the panotools library that is at the core of our community, disappeared.

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

First of all, we hope to recruit a student from the community. This is a growing and vibrant community. We will make sure that the student has the appropriate gear to shoot panoramas and we will do all we can to share with them our passion for panoramas.