[Ns-developers] ns-3 & gsoc

[Mathieu Lacage]

hi all,

In about 2 months, the gsoc (http://code.google.com/soc/2008) program
will start again: mentoring organizations will have to apply to become
accepted in the program and thus become eligible to mentor students.
Last year, the ns-3 project was accepted in the program and 3 student
projects were selected: 

1) nsc: Florian Westphal/Sam Jensen
2) parallelization: Hagen Paul Pfeifer/George Riley
3) quagga: Liu Jian/Mathieu Lacage

Out of these 3 projects, nsc was very successful since we were able to
merge its result in september. None of the 2 other projects have been
merged yet but Hagen is still around, using ns-3 so, overall, despite
this being our first year in the program, I think we did reasonably well
both in terms of mentoring our students and helping the project. 

Tom Henderson and Sam Jansen attended the Google Mentor Summit in
October and Tom reported on this in the past:
http://mailman.isi.edu/pipermail/ns-developers/2008-October/004884.html
Tom is enthusiastic about applying for a spot in the 2009 program.

Anyway, the goal of this email is not to go back to 2008 but to try to
get started on the 2009 program. I would like to:

1) Find a new program manager/administrator and a backup person for him.
Last year, I took care of this together with the help of Tom Henderson
and Joe Kopena but I don't really want to do this again so, we need to
find two volunteers to:
  - monitor the gsoc admin mailing-list for all gsoc news
  - manage all the mentors and students: make sure they do their stuff
on time, help with paperwork, etc.
Ultimately, the gsoc admin is also responsible for handling disappearing
students and/or mentors which is not very fun but can happen.

2) Find new mentors and projects: last year, we put together a list of
projects and, then, allocated mentors to each student. I think that it
will be much easier to just find mentor+project pairs, advertise them,
and then, find matching students.

3) Find new student candidates: if there is a project which is dear to
your heart and you would like to work on during the summer of 2009, and
you are looking for a mentor (or you found someone willing to mentor
you), now is the time to come forward.

So, to summarize, this email is really a request for volunteers to:
  - be admins (need 2 volunteers)
  - be mentors
  - be students

If you want to be a mentor or a student with a project of yours, you
need to put together a project description, about 5 to 10 lines. Of
course, since this is expected to be an ns-3 gsoc project, the project
must be related to ns-3 in one way or another.

So, if you are interested, please, reply to this email, preferably on
ns-developers with a project description, before mid-february. Please,
also add your project description to
http://www.nsnam.org/wiki/index.php/Gsoc2009.

best regards,
Mathieu