What is your Organization's Name?
Community Software Lab, Inc
What is your Organization's Homepage?
http://thecsl.org
Describe your organization.
We improve non-profit effectiveness through free software. We improve free software through our experience with non-profit organizations. As a means to these ends, we provide training and practical experience in system administration and software development to our volunteers.
We provide no cost email and web hosting to 30 non-profit organizations (mostly in Lowell Massachusetts). Apart from small extras like IMAP, our focus is personal, quick and helpful support.
For our 5 year existence, our work has been done by Americorps/VISTA members and volunteers.
We pay for equipment, fees and food through small grants, contract fees donated by our volunteers and cash donations from our volunteers and friends.
Our least glamorous work is removing viruses and replacing power supplies on computers at the local teen center. Our most glamorous work is the software that drives http://MVHub.com
Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2007? What do you hope to gain by participating?
Our searchable directory of social services MVHub.com is better than (other) social service directories that we know about. However, it is not supported by a community of developers.
Karl Fogals' books describe the political, social, administrative and code infrastructure needed to support a community of free software developers. We're making progress on the non-code stuff. We hope $4500 and Google glamour will attract a programmer who can get our code to a place where people can contribute easily.
We hope that our next group of contributors will be a software engineering class at the CS Dept of UMass Lowell.
We define a "community of developers" as a group more than 5 or more volunteer developers with no connection outside their project, who regularly contribute code and discussion to their project. There are To our knowledge, there are no software projects with free software licenses designed to solve non-profit problems, that have a community of developers. We hope either to be the first such project or to learn of another free software, non-profit orriented project with a community of developers we can learn from.
Did your organization participate in GSoC 2005 or 2006? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and failures of your student projects. (optional)
We have not participated in past GSoC
If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)? (optional)
We have not applied for previous GSoC
What license does your project use?
GPL v2 or later
URL for your ideas page
http://thecsl.org/go/vol/gsoc/2007/ideas.shtml
What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
Announcements and discussion are at: http://lists.thecsl.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cadre-config
cvs commits are at: http://lists.thecsl.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/cadre-config
Right now, both lists are mostly sys-admin stuff not related to MVHub. Most MVHub communication to date has happened person to person in real time. Most MVHub development email is to private email boxes
It is our intention to create MVHub-dev@lists.thecsl.org and MVHub-cvs@lists.thecsl.org for the next phase of development which is building a community of developers.
Where is the main IRC channel for your organization?
We don't use IRC, right now
Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now. (optional)
Our volunteer application, doesn't mention MVHub, but it is a good screen that is is respectful of everyone's time. http://thecsl.org/go/vol/
Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please enter their Google Account address. We will email them to confirm, your organization will not become active until they respond. (optional)
ebryant.link@gmail.com
About Your Mentors
What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
Right now, John Miller has grant funding through the summer to add features to MVHub. He is the person most actively working on the code. He has gotten more customer notes thanking him for his help than the previous seven people in his position put together.
In seven years, Stephanie Alnet
David Siegal is the original lead programmer on the project. He has 10 years experience in software developement. He has considerable emotional investment in MVHub's continued success. When he was an Americorps/VISTA he did a great job mentoring 4 other people.
Chris Sacca maintains the cvs-syncmail, dh-make-perl, libcgi-simple-perl and pyzor Debian packages. He was an Americorps/VISTA with us for one year. He was not once late for work. He worked one summer at Red Hat on their build system. We're counting on him especially for packaging advice and review.
Dan MacNeil (me) is fearless leader of theCSL.org. Second to my wife and parents, these projects are my life.
Who will your mentors be? Please enter their Google Account address separated by commas. If your organization is accepted we will email each mentor to invite them to take part. (optional)
jmiller@thecsl.org,stephane@shimaore.net,dsiegal@thecsl.org,csacca@skidmore.edu,dan@thecsl.org
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
In our limited experience, by the time a student has disappeared, it is too late. In past work with work study students, careful selection, weekly and at times daily check-ins proved helpful.
If we can can find a UMass Lowell CS student or even somebody in the metro Boston area, we can offer that person our happy office vibe and workplace social activities.
Four of five students we've worked with have gone on to market rate software development work. The fifth, decided she wanted to be an elementary school teacher. They all credit the good work references we were able to give them as a factor in getting their jobs
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
None of our mentors have let us down before. If ALL our mentors disappear, our faith in humanity will be completely destroyed. We will no longer wish to live in the world.
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
We don't have a community around MVHub, we do have some community around our wider work. We do frequent offsite lunches and weekly hour long coffee shop breaks. If somebody is on-site, they can plug into all that.
If somebody is working remotely, we have only the usual standard stuff that is easier to say than to do. (see below)
What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
Respond to their requests for information quickly. Praise hard work. Review their code quickly and carefully. Study what worked in past summer's of code.
If they are local and do good work, push for them to get teaching/research assistant jobs