Development/GSoC/2016

Welcome to LibreOffice Google Summer of Code 2016!

Introduction
Want to apply for the LibreOffice project in 2016? Read the and  sections below!

Preamble
LibreOffice has been approved as an organization for Google Summer of Code 2016. This program helps students to dive into the open source world and we hope to work on great projects with great students this summer. Please refer to the GSoC Ideas page for projects ideas.


 * Want to be a mentor? You can start reading Federico's Google Summer if Code Mentoring HOWTO. After that, feel free to add yourself as the mentor for a task in the Easy Hacks page.


 * Have some interesting project idea? You can add some exciting project idea to the GSoC Ideas, but don't forget that student only have a full-time summer to work on it and that they may need some time to get up to speed.


 * Want to apply for a project? Read the and  sections below.

Important dates
See the timeline on GSoC. In short (bold items are LibreOffice project deadlines):

How to apply
First you should have a look at the Google Summer of Code FAQ and GSoC Student Guide. We will require the following points in any application:


 * Present yourself. Since we don't know you we want to know some bits like your name, education, email address and nickname on the #libreoffice-dev IRC channel at freenode.net. Please subscribe to the LibreOffice developer list and [mailto:libreoffice@lists.freedesktop.org write an email to the list].

Remember to refer to the Gerrit patches you have submitted.


 * Prove that you want to get involved into LibreOffice. In order to check this we will require students to complete one of the Easy programming tasks on the Easy Hacks page (or part of one if that EasyHack is a selection of separate tasks), though the dead-line for this isn't hard but needs to be somewhere before the end of the selection process. This means that each student who wants to have chances to be picked for a LibreOffice project will need to build the whole application, fix a bug and submit the patch to the development mailing list. See GetInvolved for help on getting started.

Please remark, remember to compile and test your patch locally before submitting. Submitting a patch that does not compile or fail the automated tests, is seen as lack of interest in getting seriously involved.


 * Explain what you want to achieve. Provide detailed informations on the project you want to work on and the use cases. The more precise your description is, the more it will show us that you investigated the area and though about it properly before submitting. The best is to base your project on one of our Ideas that come complete with friendly mentors to help you. You may have some nice project ideas, but make sure that someone will be able to mentor your project and knows that part of the code well enough.


 * How do you plan to achieve it?. Provide us the following:
 * An estimated schedule for the summer (including any potential conflicts you could have like courses, exams...)
 * Technical details on how you want to implement it. The more sensible details you provide the easier it will be for us to check that you understood the problem and difficulty


 * Why should we choose you?. Give us all the reasons for choosing you. Any past open source hacking is interesting us as well as your hacking and socializing skills.

Accepted Students
(Students whose application is accepted to GSoC 2016)

Handy Tips
There's some useful information for Students and for Mentors here:
 * Development/GSoC
 * Development/GSoC

Public Profile
Website URL https://www.libreoffice.org

Tagline

LibreOffice is one of the biggest well known open source projects.

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Logo

Primary Open Source License GNU Lesser General Public License v3 (LGPLv3)

Organization Category End User Applications

Technology Tags

C++ Python Java

Topic Tags

office suite cloud big project

Ideas List

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/GSoC/Ideas

Descriptions
Short Description

LibreOffice is a vivid community, delivering a complete office suite. We value new contributors, and have special support in place to help getting started

Long Description

LibreOffice is community-driven and developed software, and is a project of the not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice is developed by users who, just like you, believe in the principles of Free Software and in sharing their work with the world in non-restrictive ways.

We believe that users should have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software that we distribute. While we do offer no-cost downloads of the LibreOffice suite of programs, Free Software is first and foremost a matter of liberty, not price. We campaign for these freedoms because we believe that everyone deserves them.

Though the members of our community hail from many different backgrounds, we all value personal choice and transparency, which translates practically into wider compatibility, more utility, and no end-user lock-in to a single product. We believe that Free Software can provide better-quality, higher-reliability, increased-security, and greater-flexibility than proprietary alternatives.

The community behind LibreOffice is the heart of the project, without which we would not have the resources to continue developing our software. The passion and drive that every individual brings to the community results in collaborative development that often exceeds our own expectations. With dozens of different essential roles in the project, we invite everyone to join us in our work and help us to make LibreOffice known and accessible to all.

The Statutes of the Document Foundation, developed by our own community members, guide the way we work and encourage new members to contribute in a way which benefits both the whole community as well as themselves. Through the use of copyleft licenses such as the GNU Lesser General Public License, Mozilla Public License, and Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, we commit to protecting your rights as developers and content creators.

Proposals
Application Instructions

First you should have a look at the Google Summer of Code FAQ and GSoC Student Guide. We will require the following points in any application:


 * Present yourself
 * Prove that you want to get involved into LibreOffice
 * Explain what you want to achieve
 * How do you plan to achieve it?
 * Why should we choose you?

Please find more details on the application process in our wiki

Proposal Tags

C++ Python Java new idea easyHack ref

Contact Methods
IRC Channel https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Website/IRC

Mailing List https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Mailing_List

General Email thb@documentfoundation.org

Links
Google+ URL (optional)

https://plus.google.com/+libreoffice/posts

Twitter URL (optional)

https://twitter.com/libreoffice

Blog URL (optional)

https://blog.documentfoundation.org/

Application
Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code?

GSoC attract a lot of students of whom some can be motivated to be long term committers. An old project like LibreOffice, need a mixture of old and new developers, hence GSoC is very important for our future. For the student, being part of a large well known project like LibreOffice is a big plus on their CVs, something we take very seriously. GSoC is the major opertunity for students around the world to be an active part of OpenSource, and we want to help making it a combined success.

How many potential mentors have agreed to mentor this year?

11-15

How will you keep mentors engaged with their students?

We use mail and IRC as the primary communication channels, with an exceptional g++ hangout when needed. In order to monitor the overall process, we have a weekly steering meeting, where GSoC are discussed in order for detecting problems before they become real problems. Each student will have two mentors to avoid problems of disappearing mentors (even if only during the holidays time).

How will you help your students stay on schedule to complete their projects?

Our mentors are typically people, who are present on our IRC channels on a daily basis and have therefore also sufficient capacity to very the students schedules. Our GSoC administrators (who are also mentors) will follow the progress of each sub-project at a high level. We use Gerrit for patch management, and with that it is easy to monitor the progress in work.

In order to be selected, the students need to accomplish an easy programming task or fix any easy bug from LibreOffice bugzilla. This requires them to build and start looking at the code, this gives the student more confidence in the task ahead and our mentors a chance to look at how the student work.

All students will be required to submit report their progress every week on the libreoffice development mailing-list and submit/update a patch on gerrit every week. This will help to spot the difficulties before the student is actually lost. The report doesn't need to be long if the patch clearly show work is being done.

How will you get your students involved in your community during GSoC?

The students are, from before applying to GSoC, being welcomed as part of our mentoring program. In the mentoring program, we encourage the students to participate in discussions on IRC and mail. Our mentors will often, ask the students to present their ideas to the community and thus get involved. In our opinion students need to do more than just write code, they need to interact with the community by propoising solutions and modity them until we have a community consensus. The interaction will ensure that students become part of the "team".

How will you keep students involved with your community after GSoC?

We have a mentoring program in place, with the purpose an guiding new contributors into becomming full committers. The GSoC students will be (since most of them are new) will be part of that program. We not only help new contributors getting part of the community, we also monitor progress, and actively try to keep the motivation high. We believe an open and active community is one of the best assets in keeping contributors. We will before, during and after GSoC keep a personal contact with the students making them be a part of the community

Has your org been accepted as a mentoring org in Google Summer of Code before?

Yes

Which years did your org participate in GSoC?

2016 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011

What is your success/fail rate per year?

2011 7/7 2012 10/9 2013 13/11 2014 10/10 2015 12/10 2016 11/9

If your org has applied for GSoC before but not been accepted, select the years:

'''If you are a new organization to GSoC, is there a Google employee or previously participating organization who will vouch for you? If so, please enter their name, contact email, and relationship to your organization. (optional)'''

Are you part of a foundation/umbrella organization?

No

What year was your project started?

2010

Anything else we should know (optional)?

LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.org and the Go-oo project migrated to LibreOffice. LibreOffice in itself only participated from 2011 GSoC, but:
 * OpenOffice.org did in 2005, 2006 and 2007
 * and Go-Oo did in 2009 and 2010