Google Summer of Code 2006 - call for mentors!

[sinbad]

I know some of you were interested in this, but I didn't want to say anything until it was all finalised - OGRE has now been accepted as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2006. This is basically a great opportunity for students to cut their teeth on a real open source project, and earn a bit of money at the same time.

At this stage, only mentors are allowed to sign up - student sign-up starts on 1 May. I'm interested in knowing whether anyone in the community is interested in becoming a mentor. I'm signed up, but we have to provide at least one backup mentor to cover holidays etc - but of course the more the merrier. I have no idea how many appropriate students will apply and it would be nice to have a little slack if need be. I figure there are quite a few experienced and helpful people here in the forum who would be very appropriate mentors - please step forward if you think you can.

Mentor FAQ

The mentoring organisation (OGRE) gets a slice of the funds too, which will be used to fund the site and perhaps (if we get a few students) an OSX machine since we're a bit lacking in that area. I'm also very willing to split or redistribute the mentoring fee to mentors who request it and who can give the required amount of time to monitoring a student project.

So, if you've been around OGRE for a little while and want to get involved as a mentor, please just sign up on the Summer of Code site. I'm sure it's a good thing to have on your CV too

[xavier]

I didn't really see how one could sign up as an Ogre mentor, since basically you are the organization in this case.

[sinbad]

Ah, sorry they didn't broadcast it apparantly to cut down on spam registrations (don't we all know about those).

If you want to apply to be a mentor, please let me know and I'll send you the URL. (sent to xavier)

[BenO]

i would be happy to be a mentor.

I have a little year experience of average usage.
do u think it would be valuable ?

[Chris Jones]

yea, how much experience/knowledge would you actually need to be a mentor?

[sinbad]

Basically you need to be able to help the student when they get stuck, give them some direction, and help them solve problems.

Bear in mind they will be extending or making addons for OGRE. Therefore the most appropriate mentors will be people who have not only used OGRE, but who have looked under the hood regularly too and understand how some of the guts work. Ideally they will have developed at least one add-on, extension, patched bugs, tied OGRE into a larger framework etc. Ie the more complex stuff.

BenO / Chris Jones - do you have that sort of experience, or is it mainly using OGRE from the outside?

[BenO]

am binding Ogre + some other libs to lua :O

[Chris Jones]

i do have usable knowledge of OGRE, and ill be writing a graphicsManager using OGRE for OGE, but i cant say im at the stage you require. ive had to look at certain parts of OGREs code but im not familiar with it on that scale.

so although i would like to, i wont. ill join next year if you do it again

[reimpell]

I can stand in for the mentor role for any project related to Ogre's Blender support, e.g.,

• integrating armature export to the pose/morph exporter,
• adding Dagon's new animation features to the dotScene format,
• mapping Blender's rendering materials to corresponding shaders for Ogre.

[jacmoe]

A stronger Blender support would be absolutely awesome!

[Lee04]

I am interested in several of the projects like FX converter. Procedural stuff what ever. Depending on what they want to work with a bit as well.

I am having a group of students over this summer working on other stuff as well one or two more is fine by me. Infact I already sent them a email about this.

I usually have final year project student at my place. They produce quite good stuff. Usually we have done GPGPU related stuff but also other things.
I also part time as a mentor for the Stockholm University students when they do there SPA projects.

And I been teaching edutainment for a year or so with a class of 30 people.
And I studied problem based learning.

So I hope I am qualified I think I know my way around Ogre and GPUs by now. A bit anyway.

I don't get it where do you sign up as a mentor, the FAQ dosn't say nor does the web pages have a link of some kind, I can't see it anyways.

cheers

Lee04

[tuan kuranes]

- Skeletal animation LOD as in Adaptive Dynamics of Articulated Bodies that can be used in data driven simulation, data+user control, user control. Could implement some physical controller samples as in animating virtual characters using motion data and simulation in a context dependant way in order to show simplification results in each configuration (data, simulation, data+simulation)

- Impostor Lod system that can Impostor Geometry with Relief Textures.

[sinbad]

Good ideas tuan. Feel free to add to the SoC ideas list.

A reminder to others - you have until 22 May to become a mentor for the Summer of Code, should you want to be. So far we have 4 mentors including me, with potentially 2 others who have expressed interest but haven't signed up yet. It would be better to sign up earlier rather than later since student registrations begin tomorrow and you won't be able to vote on applications if you're not registered. I'm going to put some guidelines for students up on the wiki later on.

As you've noticed I've created a separate forum for the SoC to make it easier for students / mentors to discuss things without having to wade through the rest of the forum.

My expectation is that each student will have a single primary mentor who is responsible for all the things listed on the SoC mentor FAQ, but that all other mentors will chip in to help if they feel they can, hence the forum. In fact, all registered users of the forum can reply to posts here to help them if they want, they just can't start any new threads. Be aware that staying on-topic is especially important here, so please don't hijack - this forum is primarily for the benefit of SoC students.

[edit]I've made the forum open to new posters for the moment so prospective students can discuss their proposals here. Will shut that down after the proposals have been chosen.[/edit]

[sinbad]

Summer of Code wiki page is up, mentors please include a 1 or 2 line summary of yourself

[Kencho]

I would love to be one, but I'm afraid I don't have the required knowledge of OGre internals, open-source projects management, bugtracking...
Anyways, we'll be able to help as well, right?

[sinbad]

Absolutely - I'm counting on the community to be as helpful as ever, students will just have the added advantage of having a mentor to pester directly

[Kencho]

Cool!! Anyways I'll try to find some kind of project that I could mentor in case someone wants to do it, as I'd be extremely happy to do it

[jacmoe]

Cool!! Anyways I'll try to find some kind of project that I could mentor in case someone wants to do it, as I'd be extremely happy to do it

Caelum 2 ?

[Kencho]

Haha yep... ^__^' Anyways I'm quite busy with my game now (and spent my whole day exporting a mesh from Blender! *faints*). Though I'll release the camera system (at least), and I've got many ideas and prototypes for Caelum as well
Just some time, just some time

[baker]

i wonder if a project gets some awesome recognition, if google would extend a job offer. =)

[sinbad]

Just a reminder to mentors that the student application period ends in about 48 hours, so if you have any comments to make on applications that would require the student to update their application, you should make it ASAP. The earlier you start reviewing the applications, the better, even though final decision on acceptance doesn't have to be made until the 22nd (at the very latest).

If you feel you could mentor an application, please indicate as such even if another mentor has already indicated this, because when we come down to the final list some juggling may have to take place depending on the number of acceptable applications and how many different projects each mentor is willing to take on. I think realistically 2 per mentor is the maximum, although a single mentor could probably more easily mentor multiple acceptable applications for the same project (and it would probably make sense to do this if we do accept multiple applications for the same thing). If you have any thoughts on the numbers of projects you might accept, let me know.

[tuan kuranes]

I don't get it, do mentor have a dedicated interface on soc website to do all this ? (I cannot find it...)
Or should we indicate here what application we could mentor ?

[sinbad]

Hmm, you should have got a mail from Google once you were accepted - the web interface is http://code.google.com/soc/mentor_home.html , then click on 'Rank Applications'.

[gzmzhen]

Is there a limit to the number of applications that OGRE can accept?

Thanks,
Nate

[sinbad]

Yes, the limit will be based on the amount of time mentors can spare. We have had a lot of applications (32 so far, perhaps there might be some last-minute ones before 17:00 PST today). We will pick the best applications out of this up to the amount of projects mentors are willing to pick up, so inevitably some students are going to be turned away.

I had only intended to take 1 project, but I've caved in and picked 3 I could mentor simply because I want to see them happen. Final decisions on allocations will be made over the next 2 weeks.