GSoC proposal guidelines

You are free to adapt one of our suggested topics or come up with something of your own. In either case we expect you to put a good deal of thought into it and provide sufficient detail to convince us that you are likely to do something great with VTK. It is a good idea to have your proposal reviewed by a colleague or academic advisor, the suggested mentor for one of the suggested topic, or any member of VTK's developer community, all of whom can be found on the mailing list.

Student Proposal Guidelines

We do not require a specific format, but the following information would be useful to us. They must be submitted through the GSoC web site.

Requirements

• Name.
• Email address we can reach you at.
• Name of project
• Goal of project
• Sketch the technical approach that you intend to take.
• Point out relevant code in VTK that you think you will use and/or extend.
• Provide a timeline with milestones of your expected development progress.
• Do you have any other commitments during the summer that will affect your start date, end date or compete for your coding attention? GSoC is intended to be a full time summer job, mentors will enforce a high level of involvement.

Suggestions

In addition you might like to include the following information to help us assess your application,

• Please tell us about yourself (technical background, open source contributions, etc).
• What are you studying?
• Why are you the right person for the proposed project?
• How many hours per week do you intend to work on the project?
• Are you comfortable working remotely under a mentor who may not be in the same time zone as you? Have you ever worked in a similar way before? How will you communicate with your mentor, keep them updated of progress/work through problems?
• If your native language is not English, are you comfortable working closely with a mentor whose native language is English? It is also possible that we could pair you with a mentor who has the same native language.
• IRC, instant messenger/alternate contact details.
• Provide the name and email address of your academic advisor at your school who we can contact if we have questions about your background.
• How familiar are you with the programming language(s), technologies and software projects you intend to work with?
• Have you used VTK before?
• Have you built VTK (or a higher level project that uses VTK) before?
• Have you submitted a patch (any sensible change, no matter how trivial) to VTK's gitlab for review and provided a link? /* Strongly recommended by not an absolute requirement. */

After you have written your proposal you should get it reviewed. Do not rely on the mentors to do it for you via the web interface, ask a colleague or developer for feedback.