Playpower Application for Google Summer of Code (GSOC)

[Derek Lomas]

Kishan, I think these are really good points -- so I'll forward your letter to the list. 

List-- any comments? ideas? suggestions?

Cheers,

Derek

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Kishan Patel <kish...@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Mar 5, 2011 at 7:56 AM
To: Derek Lomas <derek...@gmail.com>

Hi Derek,

We need to get in touch with the wider community for us to take part in GSOC and make it a grand success. We as a core team are not fully aware of existing tools, are not very technically sound and we surely need to make this a community process. On going through the nesdev forums one can see that NES development goes on and there would be some random guy who would have released some good software! (For instance, the NES IDE guy just released an updated version of NESICIDE, some guy just coded a cool disassembler etc.).

The bigger Playpower community/NESDEV community are better people for us to ask as to what sort of projects should be ideal for GSOC. A post at nesdev forums would be great, but we should at least have a thread running on the playpowertech list asap. You may give deadline of coming up with ideas as 8th March and then we decide on the mentors for each project. The deadline of the application is 11th March. It is like "Call for ideas and Mentors for GSOC 2011".

These are the questions one should answer as an organization (Apart from the first question we can look at other organization's answers):

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating? // This answer should be strong for us to get in!
What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
What is the URL for your ideas page?

Is there anything else you would like to tell the GSOC team? // Here we can add things like GDC, E3, etc.

Example Application:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/GSoC_2010_organization_app

Initial Ideas:

- Malaria Game 

- Keyboard support for MAC Emulator

- Graphic Tool

- Pre-processor for asm6 that converts routines like a loop, animation etc. to code that can be assembled by asm6.

- cc65- library development

- Educational Snake and Ladder 

I don't think it is a good idea for someone to complete our 3 in 1 games as they would first have to understand the code. I would have to spend at least a week or two to clean up the code.

Thank you,

Kishan

[Kishan Patel]

We don't have much time before the application deadline so please throw up ideas and let's try our best to get slots! 

Thanks,

Kishan

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[Pasquale Barilla]

Going through the application guidelines (and the questions GSOC ask), it looks like we have alot of work to do. It is possible, though.

As far as i can tell, the few things we need to decide on are:

1. Mentors (who will they be?)
2. Ideas (what is most valuable to us right now)
3. Community (we need to have IRC, an ideas page, more active mailing list, etc)

Mentors:

Our choice of mentors should really be based on our ideas. If our ideas are based on ASM, then someone like Don Miller is the obvious choice. However, we need to decide as a group on our final list of ideas and then we can properly decide on the appropiate mentor.

Ideas:

I can see a few criteria for the ideas. Realistically, the odds of someone wanting to participate who knows ASM is slim. Therefore, I believe the ideas should then be relating to tools that will help us in other areas. Perhaps an IDE (although the NESICIDE handles that pretty well), a graphics tool, or something akin to a "game maker" (simple drag and drop interface, etc).

There was a mario bros 3 rom hacking tool, i think its called "smb3 workshop" (http://hukka.furtopia.org/projects/m3ed/) , where you could drag and drop platforms, enemies, coins, etc. You could also edit every part of the graphics data, sound data, text and everything (funny note about the text, SMB3 doesnt have every letter of the alphabet included, as some letters [H, for example] are never used!)

The idea of being able to recycle code is especially important to us. If we can make a tool that allows anyone to drag and drop elements into a playfield (each element has rules, of course) then the sky is the limit. Being able to drop in your own graphics (or edit existing graphics) would mean that one game you could have a desert scene, but then changing a few sprites would turn it into a mechanical scene. It also means that anyone can make games for the famiclone (well, potentially), and suddenly Playpower becomes a big part of the 8-bit community.

We do need a few ideas for the students to choose from, with varying levels of complexity. The idea i mentioned above is more on the extreme end.

Community:

We need IRC. We need a blog. We need more activity. Currently, I dont know if the project is active or not. If i was someone new, and i looked at the blog and saw that it has been nearly a year since the last update, i would be concerned.

Hope this helps. If you need help writing the proposals etc, hit me up.

-Pat

[Pasquale Barilla]

I'd be okay with that. My skype id is "pasquale.barilla1". I can make myself available any time, just give me some warning (since im on the other side of the world, hehe).

I think if we just use the sample questions from GSOC it would be okay:

(http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/faqs)

2. What should a mentoring organization application look like?

In addition to anything else your organization would like to submit as an application, Google will be asking (at least) the following questions as part of the application process:

1. Describe your organization.
2. Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?
3. Did your organization participate in past Google Summer of Codes? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
4. If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
5. What license(s) does your project use?
6. What is the URL for your Ideas page?
7. What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
8. What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
9. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
10. Who will be your backup organization administrator?
11. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.

1. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
2. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
3. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?

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

-Pat

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 2:30 PM, Dixie Ching <dixie...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, I think I'm on the same pg as you guys now. Perhaps a Skype call is the best way to go since the deadline is around the corner... Ideally Kishan, Pat, Derek & Don could all be on... What's everyone's availability like tonight and tomorrow night?

(and if you're solving this offline, great! Just let me know if you need my organizing assistance!)

di...@nyu.edu | 510.859.3376

Sent from my iPhone.

[Don Miller]

I can Skype tomorrow night.

On Mar 6, 2011, at 10:30 PM, Dixie Ching wrote:

Ok, I think I'm on the same pg as you guys now. Perhaps a Skype call is the best way to go since the deadline is around the corner... Ideally Kishan, Pat, Derek & Don could all be on... What's everyone's availability like tonight and tomorrow night?

(and if you're solving this offline, great! Just let me know if you need my organizing assistance!)

di...@nyu.edu | 510.859.3376

Sent from my iPhone.

On Mar 6, 2011, at 10:05 PM, Pasquale Barilla <pat.b...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Dixie Ching]

Ok, I think I'm on the same pg as you guys now. Perhaps a Skype call is the best way to go since the deadline is around the corner... Ideally Kishan, Pat, Derek & Don could all be on... What's everyone's availability like tonight and tomorrow night?

(and if you're solving this offline, great! Just let me know if you need my organizing assistance!)

di...@nyu.edu | 510.859.3376

Sent from my iPhone.

On Mar 6, 2011, at 10:05 PM, Pasquale Barilla <pat.b...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Pasquale Barilla]

i had a go at the skeleton of the application questions. alot of extra elabouration is needed, hopefully we can discuss this tonight.

-Pat

1.    Describe your organization.

Playpower is an open-source, educational software development group that creates software for legacy computing devices. We hope to bridge the digital divide by offering learning software to “the other 90%”, by way of a market intervention with sellers of “famiclone” (8-bit NES clones) computers, AKA $12 computer. (you know, standard boilerplate)

2.    Why is your organization applying to participate in Google Summer of Code 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?

Exposure. (elaboration needed, discuss)

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

No

4.    If your organization has not previously participated in Google Summer of Code, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?

No idea, don’t think so.

5.    What license(s) does your project use?

CC not sure which one.

6.    What is the URL for your Ideas page?

Wiki Page (at work, cant set it up now)

7.    What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

http://groups.google.com/group/playpowertech

8.    What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

Set this up, maybe on freenode?

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

Let’s work on this together – it needs to relate to the ideas.

10.    Who will be your backup organization administrator?

Lets discuss this

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

Relation to ideas, lets discuss this also.

12.    What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

Asking the student to be liberal with commenting, and asking for complete transparency. Having the student email us after each day/second day to tell us what he/she has worked on. Having regular discussions with the student relating to their work, their current task, any obstacles and so on. Version control.

13.    What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Complete transparency. Having the mentor report on what the student is working on every week or so, and so on.

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

Adding student to playpower.ning.com, adding them to mailing list, having them involved in IRC, etc.

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

Recognition. Telling everyone in the project that the work the student is doing, having the student receive positive feedback, and reinforcing to the student that the work they are doing is helping change lives. It is important, therefore, that the student believes in the ethos of playpower before joining the project.

[Dixie Ching]

This is a great start! 

Team, can we do an initial call tonight, maybe 10pm est? Pat, will that be too early/late for you?

di...@nyu.edu | 510.859.3376

Sent from my iPhone.

[Pat Barilla]

That's in 1 hour, if my conversions are right? It should be okay, I will have to use it on my iPhone (since in at work ATM). Talk to you soon. 

Sent from my iPhone

[Dixie Ching]

Great...hoping others can join as well...

Talk to you in 45 min!

di...@nyu.edu | 510.859.3376

Sent from my iPhone.

[Robert Sitton]

For those of us that can't make the call, could someone please summarize the discussion and list any action items?  Thanks!

[Pasquale Barilla]

All,

Here is a summary of the conference call.

The GSOC represents a really great opportunity for us. Having google sponsor a student to work on a software project for us benefits us in several different ways, namely we are able to give students projects to work on which benefit us in the long run, and we get exposure in the wider open source community. And that's what will drive this project, the community.

But first, I should explain what the GSOC is. The Google Summer of Code is an initiative that Google (you may have heard of them) run, where they help pair students during their summer break from University/College with Mentoring companies, such as Playpower.
Google will give the student a stipend of $5000US, and the mentoring company $500US. In return, google asks that the mentoring company have several ideas ready that the student can work on, and several Mentors who can help the student if they get stuck or have any questions.

And this is where we come in. We need to decide what ideas we would like the student to work on, and whom should mentor those ideas.

Derek broke up the ideas into 3 categories: Tools, Games and Asset Sharing.

Examples of tools are YY-CHR, Tracker, ASM compilers, etc. Examples of Games is the engine for games, say a Platformer engine, or a card game engine. And examples of Assets is anything that would enable sharing of assets.

(Asset Sharing sounds like a strange idea, especially when discussing open source, so to help paint a better picture: one of the ideas we were throwing around was for a rails driven web app, in which users could create assets [be it art, music, or code] and then share it right on the page. When it came time to build a game, you would piece together the assets you need and voila! you have the scaffolding for a game. The best part was that it rewarded the user for submitting assets, and other users could put calls out for specific types of asset)

Here is we need your help, we need to brainstorm and come up with some really radical ideas. Radical in that they change the way that the open source community thinks about open source, and radical in that they are totally rad!

Does anyone have any ideas for projects that we could have a student work on? Dont be afraid to suggest anything that you feel may help.

Some of the ideas already suggested by Kishan were:

- Malaria Game 

- Keyboard support for MAC Emulator

- Graphic Tool

- Pre-processor for asm6 that converts routines like a loop, animation etc. to code that can be assembled by asm6.

- cc65- library development

- Educational Snake and Ladders

 

We only have a few days left until submission, and there is no "maximum" amount of ideas we can have, so let’s go a little nuts. If you feel that you have a good idea, share it! If you think there is a tool that could make your job easier, let us know.

 

Take care,

 

Pat.

[Pasquale Barilla]

The ideas page is now on the wiki. Please feel free to make your ideas manifest there.

http://work.playpower.org/w/page/37184803/ideas