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Google Summer of Code 2013

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agarie edited this page Apr 9, 2013 · 2 revisions

Google Summer of Code 2013

This is our mentorship application for Google Summer of Code 2013.

Mentorship Application

Description

SciRuby is a small, but very committed, organization hoping to mainstream scientific computing in Ruby. While many of the necessary components are already available, there's no integration between them. Our objective is to create good and integrated tools – a numerical linear algebra library, visualization packages, feature-rich datasets, etc – so the Ruby science community can grow around them.

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2011? What do you hope to gain by participating?

Open source science has a cultural problem. Scientific research is, for the most part, closed. Even open access journals have difficulty compelling their authors to release source code. Researchers believe their code to be hastily written, and not worthy of release; or others worry about getting scooped. Most have a great deal at stake in the publish-or-perish world – too much, perhaps, to freely change behaviors. Thus, this is a culture that must be changed beginning with future scientists: students.

If we can encourage younger scientists to freely share code, we make it more likely that they will share code when seeking tenure and long after. Perhaps as importantly, if younger scientists are sharing code without the negative consequences that older scientists fear, change will be promoted throughout the institution. Creating culture from nothing is difficult, if not impossible.

Luckily, the culture already exists in the Ruby community, which actively shares much of its work via Github and in the form of RubyGems. The Rails community is a great example of what we would like to create; these are people who have a fair bit at stake – they write business software – and yet still actively share their creations without reservations. Currently, many younger scientists are drawn to Python or R, which – while possessing many of the necessary libraries – lack the culture that Ruby has so successfully promoted. We want to create incentives for young scientists to choose Ruby, that we might eventually "infect" science with Ruby culture. That starts with young people, and particularly the ones with intellectual and scientific curiosity. Recently we received a grant from the Ruby Association (founded by some of the creators of the language), which allowed us to fund some students, with fantastic results.

Thus we believe that we are important to the Ruby community and have the experience to make good use of GSoC's resources. We hope that by participating in Google Summer of Code that we might attract not only a community for our project, but evangelists for open source science.

What criteria did you use to select the individuals who will act as mentors for your organization? Please be as specific as possible.

We selected our mentors for their proven experience in scientific computation, keeping an eye out for those who have a track record of advising students successfully. Another very important aspect in the decision was their familiarity with each project's code. All of our selections are extremely responsive (i.e., they reply to emails quickly and with useful information). Our organization is not large, but we are fortunate to have some excellent contributors from which to draw. Also, two of our mentors already mentored funded students for the SciRuby organization before, resulting in a good amount of progress towards our objectives.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

We believe that the primary protection against this is ensuring the student stay engaged in the project and learn a lot. Thus our mentors will talk weekly with the students (more than that if possible), in a very casual manner, to know what's going on with their work. In the case a student disappears for a long period, we'll send one or two e-mails asking about their progress and, if he doesn't answer, we'll have to fail him.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

We can assign students to a new mentor. With that said, our mentors have a history of being extremely responsive to emails, even at those times when they're incredibly busy.

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

Students will be required to keep their code on Github and contribute to discussions in the mailing list. They are free to post about their work on SciRuby's (or other) blog. If geographically feasible, we will invite them to visit their mentor (or any mentor available).

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

We plan to include students in the discussions regarding the design of various libraries and applications, as is said in our ideas page. This way, they will have a sense of ownership of the project they work on – which can and will ensure some of them continue to contribute to SciRuby after GSoC.

If you are a small or new organization applying to GSoC, please list a larger, established GSoC organization or a Googler that can vouch for you here.

The BioRuby project from the Open Bioinformatics Foundation is vouching for us this year. We're both organizations with Ruby in mind and many of our projects can benefit them as well.

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