Here's the draft of our mentoring application.
Describe your organization
“Kyanite Studios” is a NPO which aims at promoting free computer arts. We talk about computer arts when computers are used during the creation process. In this context, Kyanite Studios advise artists on the use of existing tools, design new ones, inform them about intellectual property issues and participate in the promotion of their work.
By its nature, computer art is constantly evolving as it is closely linked to the development of technologies and software. In return, it means that the artist becomes dependent on the tools he uses. It is crucial that software solutions offer sustainability, extensibility and efficiency.
According to this point of view, Kyanite Studios believe that free software is the ideal answer to this problem.That's why, we have started developing some software in this goal and why we are continuously looking for new paths to explore.
Our main software is CrystalArchitect. It is basically an IDE for building real-time and interactive 3D worlds. It's not a modeler but a tool that tries to capture all the complexity of building such worlds (dealing with physics, A.I., scenarii, etc) by providing powerful and high-level features. The goal is to offer to the community a software that fills the gap between an idea of a 3D simulation and its concrete realization.
CrystalArchitect puts the emphasis on teamwork by enabling real-time collaborative editing of 3D scenes and by providing mechanisms to build up from digital assets produced by third-party software. The applications are broad: medical simulations, virtual visits, games, VJing, etc…
CrystalArchitect is mainly based on two sub-projects : CAF and DAMN.
CAF is a model-driven, component-based, framework for easily building complex software in python.
DAMN is a distributed digital assets management system that enables co-workers to publish, retrieve and use shared resources through the network. It also provides transcoding mechanisms which allow already existing software such as The gimp or Blender to work with those assets, independently of their original formats.
Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2009? What do you hope to gain by participating?
Kyanite is applying to the GSoC because we have seen during previous years that this program allows organizations to meet a lot of new people, even if they are not selected. Meeting new people for us is important because we are always eager to introduce new ideas in our software and this is only possible with a lot of different brains.
More than meeting people, we are excited by the opportunity of following and helping students who are really interested in our activities and want to start contributing to our universe.
One of our goals is to develop software that are really missing to the Free Software community and are also responding to new kinds of artistic expression (such as the VJing). We are near of reaching the first milestone and so we hope to have one or two students that could join us during at least three months to achieve this goal but most importantly to have them introduce their own ideas and become contributors in the future.
Last but not least, we know by experience that the GSoC program is generating a lot of interest for the elected projects.
Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation
Since our NPO has been created this year, this is the first time we participate in the GSoC program. Anyway, we now plan to apply every next years.
If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
Same answer 
What license(s) does your project use?
GPL v3
What is the URL for your ideas page?
What is the main development mailing list for your organization?
toolsets@lists.kyanite-studios.org
What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
#kyanite @ irc.freenode.net
Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
Technical question
- According to you, why and how can you help us?
- What is your background (studies, free software community, etc)?
- What is the biggest project that you have been involved in?
- Do you know the python programing language? What do you think about it (pros and cons)?
- Have you already used a 3D engine? If so, which one(s)?
Personal questions
- Do you consider yourself as an artist? If so, in which domain?
- How do you describe yourself in a few words?
- Do you plan to have other time-consuming activities during the SoC?
- Please, choose a sentence, write it down and tell us why you've chosen this one
Who will be your backup organization administrator?
Alban Tiberghien (LinkID: atiberghien), who's the current secretary of Kyanite Studios will be our backup administrator. We can communicate easily and are used to work together, so that we can solve eventual problems fast.
What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
We choosed our mentors on four main criterias :
- Competence : to efficiently drive a student on the technical side. A member is given a mentoring only if he/she has the expertise for a given task ;
- Pedagogy : to make sure they are able to communicate clearly and help students when they run into problems ;
- Motivation : based on their previous involvements in the NPO and their will to be a mentor ;
- Availability : If the mentor is not taking holidays during the GSoC, if he/she doesn't have a too much time consuming activity, etc.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
In this case, we would try to contact him/her to know the problem. Despite of discussions, if the student really wanted to stop to work with us, we would finally ask him to stabilize his/her work and to write a status report. Thus, work which has been done would not be lost and it could be finished by one of our members.
Anyway, we think when a student has disappeared, it's very hard to reach and motivate him/her to continue his work. That's why we want the student to take time regularly to update documentations and to take into account code reviews and bug reports. So that, we will keep a sane code basis during all the steps of development.
What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
We prefer to have a preventive action for dealing with disappearing mentors, i.e. we make sure that they are available during all the GSoC and that they are really motivated.
If anyway a mentor was disappearing, we would try to reach him by e-mail or phone to understand what's happening. If indeed the mentor wanted to stop for a good reason or wasn't answering to any of our requests, we would point the student to a backup mentor (we have elected one backup mentor per mentor).
In this last case, if the formal mentor was reappearing, we would conciliate the problem and choose the best mentor for the student to go on with.
What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
First, if the student is not familiar with free software communities, we will try to explain him/her how to behave with others members and how to efficiently use communication tools such as mailing-lists and IRC. Then, we will introduce him/her to our project community. He/she will be considered as a real member hoping that he/she definitely joins us after the SoC. He/she will have access to all our work tool : mail, wiki, trac, repositories.
After the SoC, we will ask him/her to at least keep subscribed to the mailing-lists. So that, our members can still reach him/her if they have questions about his/her work.
Finally, if possible, we would like to meet him/her in the real life at least in the beginning and the end of the SoC in order to share some beers with him/her
What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
As stated earlier, we will first encourage him/her to stay subscribed to the Mailing list and connected to our IRC channel. This way, the student will see that the community has an interest in his/her contribution which, we are convinced, is as important as the money he will receive.
We will then make sure his/her contribution is integrated into the main branch of our tools as fast as possible. We think this is important because it is a sign that his/her work is useful and a way to show him/her that he/she can now be a real contributor.
If his/her experience was positive, we will propose him/her to work again with us, either by suggesting some interesting tasks based on his/her SoC work ; or if he/she prefers, a totally new task based on his/her interests and availability.
