GSoC 2014 Organization Application

GSoC 2014: Organization Application

Organization administrators:

• Paul Tremberth
• Pablo Hoffman
• Shane Evans

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

Scrapinghub was built from the ground around open source (specifically, the Scrapy open source framework). We would like to contribute back to the Scrapy and open source community, and we hope to see Scrapy getting a lot of useful enhancements after this.

How many potential mentors do you have for this year's program? What criteria did you use to select them?

We have 7 potential mentors. All of them are deeply involved in Scrapy, with both the community, conventions and codebase, which is why we selected them. They are also all employed by Scrapinghub, the legal organization behind this application and behind Scrapy.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

At an early stage, we would probably try to pick another student. At a late stage, we will try to recover what was done until then and assign someone from the community or Scrapinghub staff to wrap it up, so that the work is not lost.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Assign one of the backup mentors, either from that task or another one. There will be a handful of mentors always available and willing to jump in. Note that the mentors are all full-time employees at Scrapinghub which reduces substantially their chances of "disappearing".

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

Before: We will ask students to get involved in the mailing lists and IRC channels to provide help, and take some bugs flagged as easy to start getting familiar with the code. During: We plan to ask them to post updates regularly to the mailing list with the progress of their tasks in order to receive feedback as early as possible, both from the organization and the community. After: We will encourage them to keep collaborating in the project and providing support. If possible, and suitable for both parties, we may also hire them or offer an internship at Scrapinghub to continue working on Scrapy itself and projects based on it.

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

We will propose enhancements to the functionality they have worked on, and suggest other ways to keep collaborating to the project. We will also encourage them to work on other features, and possibly offer them a job or internship at Scrapinghub.

Are you a new organization who has a Googler or other organization to vouch for you? If so, please list their name(s) here.

We are a new organization. We have about 3 former Googlers with us, and no other organization vouching us.

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.

This is our first time in Google Summer of Code.

If you chose "veteran" in the organization profile dropdown, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.

N/A

If you are a new organization, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

This is our first application.

Is there anything else we should know or you'd like to tell us that doesn't fit anywhere else on the application?

We would like to clarify that we are applying as Scrapinghub because Scrapy does not yet have a foundation or any other legal entity. Scrapinghub has been the company in charge of Scrapy development and community coordination since 2010.