GCI 2011 Organization Application

Organization description

SymPy is a Python library for symbolic mathematics. It aims to become a full-featured computer algebra system (CAS) while keeping the code as simple as possible in order to be comprehensible and easily extensible. SymPy is written entirely in Python and does not require any external libraries.

Why has your org chosen to participate in Google Code-in?

We believe that Google Code-in is a great opportunity to get some fresh blood into our project, from students that would not otherwise participate or find SymPy. We think that we can get some good contributions that way and some students might even stick around (that would be the ideal situation). Every outreach that we do with SymPy, be it GSoC, or conferences and other talks or getting mentioned on the Google Open Source blog, usually bring us some new users.

Another reason is that it allows us to collaborate more with other SymPy mentors and recruit new ones, and so the participation in Google Code-in helps the whole SymPy community. We have usually been quite efficient in accepting lots of patches from a lot of people, but every such opportunity is great to streamline our review/merge process even more and force us to think how we can lower the entry barrier for new contributors.

Please tell us about how your organization has prepared for Google Code-in, including what (and how many) mentors and organization administrators have agreed to help, what your schedule and response time will be during the holidays (and otherwise during the contest period) and how you plan to deal with unresponsive mentors.

People in this thread on the mailing list (http://groups.google.com/group/sympy/browse_thread/thread/8d99ab98d7af607a) have committed to helping out.

Admins: Aaron, Ondřej

Mentors: Mateusz, Hector, Stefan, Joachim, Matthew, Chris, Vladimir

Here is a detailed page with photos and short bios: https://github.com/sympy/sympy/wiki/GCI-2011-Mentors

We have four core developers, and five non-core developers. But we expect that a lot more people in the community will help out (for example we had nine mentors for GSoC). Schedule of core mentors: till December 16 (Ondřej +Aaron full, Mateusz might skip a few days here and there), after December 16 (Aaron+Mateusz full time, Ondřej might skip a few days here and there).

SymPy doesn’t have any mentor specific areas, so all mentors will have access to Melange to approve a task, and any trustworthy mentor will have push access to SymPy. As such, if some mentor becomes unresponsive, some other mentor will step in. So far, we never had any problem with disappearing mentors in GSoC. We have also participated in GHOP previously, and it seems we were able to handle things just fine.

Please provide a link to your task ideas page. This is much like the ideas page for Google Summer of Code but must include at least 5 tasks in all of the 8 categories sorted by difficulty level.*

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiMKW-ZM-_fedFpSWm51VFBFZkdTRnh3WkhYRndSVXc

What is the main development mailing list for your organization? This question will be shown to students who would like to get more information about applying to your organization for Google Code-in 2010-11. If your organization uses more than one list, please make sure to include a description of the list so students know which to use.*