TODO: classify each idea as specifically as possible, e.g. "must know Python" or "easier project; good for a student with more limited experience with C++." If your organization plans to provide an application template, it would be good to include it on your Ideas list.

Google Summer of Code
2012 Ideas List: http://pad.p2pu.org/p/gsoc-2012-ideas

Application

The Peer 2 Peer University is a grassroots open education project that organizes learning outside of institutional walls and gives learners recognition for their achievements.

P2PU encourages learning for everyone, by everyone, about almost anything. We're a global community and platform for learning where everything is free and open. Together, we're teaching and learning everything from mathematics to web development to literature, using open educational resources and learning in groups, where participation is recognized as an equally important component of learning, and hard and soft skills are validated by peers. 

P2PU is run by our global community of volunteers who all believe that the best way to learn is from and with other people, no matter where in the world you are. The result? P2PU uses peer learning and open content to scale quality education beyond the traditional institution. We also believe that when people are in the same room, amazing things can happen, and encourage our community to meet and work together on projects which improve our platform, fine-tune our pathways to learning and build our open educational offerings.

P2PU is here for the community of learners and p2pu.org is our home. In the same way that Wikipedia makes it's software, MediaWiki, available, we publish our software, Lernanta, under open source license. We do this to enable users to scratch their own itch and improve our platform and to enable reuse of our work in ways we might not have imagined. P2PU has more than 30,000 members worldwide, and we're growing steadily. We serve the community in five languages and have content partnerships with Mozilla, Creative Commons, The Open Knowledge Foundation, among others.

The P2PU Community and volunteers are supported by a non-profit 501c3 California charitable organization.


I was a Google Summer of Code student in 2008 and am applying as the Organization Administrator for P2PU. I have first hand experience in the program and realize how valuable it is to students. I owe a lot to my mentors and organization from 2008. Summer of Code gave me a chance to really fall in love with open source and discover that I could make a career out of making the world a better place. I believe that it's our duty to pay it forward and provide similar opportunities to students in the 2012 program. A wonderful side-effect of our participation is that we'll get some code committed to our project, but more importantly our goal is to gain passionate and involved community members that stick around for the long haul.


P2PU has not participated in previous GSoC programs. Our organization administrator and mentor, John Britton, participated as a student in 2008.


No, P2PU has not applied as a GSoC mentoring organization in the past.

Software is released under the Mozilla Public License, GPL, or LGPL.
P2PU uses the  Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 License for content.


http://pad.p2pu.org/gsoc-2012-ideas


http://lists.p2pu.org/mailman/listinfo/p2pu-dev


#p2pu-dev on irc.freenode.net


You don't have to follow this exact order/format, but a successful applicaiton would likely include the following sections:



Zuzel Vera <zuzel AT p2pu DOT org>

Since this is our first year applying to GSoC we are aiming to get three students. For each student we have one primary mentor and a secondary mentor who can serve as a backup in the case that the primary mentor becomes unavailable. We also have two additional mentors available in the event that we accept four students who can also function as backup mentors in the more likely event that we have three students.

We started the process with an open call to our development mailing list. Individuals that expressed interest in mentoring had one on one Skype calls with the organization administrator. Since I (org admin) have experience as a past participant of GSoC I was able to share my experience and set appropriate expectations for our mentors. We only accepted mentors that have a proven track record as contributors. Specifically this means that they have a history of contributing to the project over the course of more than one year. I (org admin) have built strong relationships with all of our mentors, and am very confident in their abilities.

Further, Half of our mentors are volunteers, half are staff members of P2PU. We took this approach so that we have the safety and assurance of knowing that someone on our staff is ultimately responsible for every student.

We're taking a proactive approach against disappearing students. We're requesting multiple forms of contact information so that we can get students back on track in even if they go offline. We have weekly (public) community and dev meetings online which students will participate in. In the event that a student is absent without notice, the mentor and org admin will be in contact with the student immediately. Every student-mentor pair is responsible for having a weekly check-in and copying the -dev mailing list and backup mentor on the conversation. In the event that any of those three miss a weekly checkin, the org admin will get involved immediately. The org admin, backup org admin, mentors, and students will be present at the weekly community and dev meetings and will be available to students directly as well.

Community Call Details: http://pad.p2pu.org/community-call
Technology Call Details: http://pad.p2pu.org/tech

For every student we have one primary mentor and a second backup mentor. All of our mentors are long standing contributors with proven track records for responsibility. In the case that a mentor becomes unavailable, the backup mentor will fill in. All of our backup mentors are employed by the non-profit and mentoring will be considered part of their job responsibilities. This way we can be sure that no student will be without a mentor. I have long standing personal relationships with all of the mentors, and am confident that they will fulfill their responsibilities to the students, the organization, and to Google.

Our community is very open, and it's easy for anyone to get involved. We have two mailing lists that we encourage students to join:
The more general "community list" and the "dev list." In addition, we have a weekly community call that is open to the public that students can join to ask questions and get involved.

Being part of P2PU is fun and addicting. Our community is very friendly and welcoming and we appreciate our contributors very much. We'll be sure to acknowledge our students work and to make them feel welcome. We'll respond to their questins quickly and make sure that they know their time is valued.



Mentors
Backup Mentors