Umit project: April 2011

Monday, April 25, 2011

Google Summer of Code 2011

As you may already know, Umit Project is in as a , and it happens that we just got through the selection process, and earlier today Google announced the winning students!

This year, Umit received 42 proposals, from 40 talented students from almost all continents in the world! We were absolutely astonished with so many talented students willing to work with us this season. So many proposals took us a long while to evaluate, and all of them involved a long process interacting with the student and assessing their capabilities, time commitments, etc.

Personally, I loved to interact with all of them, and just figured that they're all very talented and probably a good fit for helping us out at Umit, but our resources aren't infinite and we had to make a choice!

We were extremely happy to figure that Google has granted us 8 slots this year, and we're very excited with how much we can do with that. Thank you Google!

Please, join us welcoming the students that will code with us this season at !

is from Pakistan, and is going to help us change the world in the coolest summer project of his life, developing the Internet Connectivity Monitor mobile agent for Android devices. He had a very tough decision to make when he figured that all three organizations he applied for have accepted him (Apache, Umit and Globus Alliance), and we were astonished to figure that he chose us to stick with for this Summer! is going to mentor Zubair this Summer.
Diogo Pinheiro is from Portugal, and worked with us in the past, during GSoC 2010, providing several improvements to our Network Scanner. This time, he is aiming at making a dent in the world in the coolest summer project of his life, developing the Internet Connectivity Monitor Aggregator, that will provide people with real time information about any connectivity issues in their regions. Adriano Marques will mentor Diogo this Summer.
(Alan) is from China, and challenged us with new concepts and ideas on how to better implement the Internet Connectivity Monitor Agent in the coolest summer project of his life. Alan told us about his great desire to develop a challenging project like this, and hey... you got it! Adriano Marques will mentor Alan this Summer.
Dragoş Dena is from Romania, and he is going to implement the Next Generation of our Network Inventory, making it more useful for large networks. During summer, he helped us in one of our hackathons to deliver a new release, and showed a great talent and desire to help our community. Kudos for Dragoş! will mentor Dragoş this Summer.
Gaurav Ranjan is from India, and he wants to bring our Network Scanner to the next level, by adding ipv6 support and several other nifty features, aiming for a 2.0 release by the end of this Summer! Gaurav showed a great desire to participate, technical knowledge and was capable to debate and adjust his proposal to comply with Network Scanner's goals. Hey Gaurav, take good care of our beloved Network Scanner! Bartosz Skowron will mentor Gaurav this Summer.
is from Brazil, and the second Guilherme in our team. I Bet this is a good sign ;-) He wants to alleviate the pain out of debugging VoIP networks by implementing auditing tools for the SIP protocols to be integrated in our Packet Manipulator, using our Audits Framework. Guilherme has worked for telecoms for a while, and he surely knows the pain it is to audit and keep a large network running. Francesco Piccino will mentor Guilherme this Summer.
is from Singapore, and he proposed us a very solid approach on how to port our Network Scanner to Android devices. He fought for his idea, and we bought his vision. Now, by the end of this summer, network scanner will also give you nice scanning results while in your mobile. João Medeiros is going to mentor Angad this Summer.
is from Poland, and the third Polish to join own team (yeah... bet it is a good sign also) and his goal for this summer is to deliver a full featured real cloud based Network Scanner, that will allow for easily storing and searching though results, scheduling scans, receiving results by email and much more. will mentor Piotrek this Summer.

We really wanted to have the resources to mentor all students and for that reason we created the Umit Summer of Code program, where we can accomodate more students than in the GSoC version.

There are many other initiatives like USoC in the Open Source community. A friend of ours took the time to list them, and made a very nice post in her blog listing her findings.

Thank you Google and everyone that submitted a proposal to Umit Project. We hope we can all work together this Summer to make a change in the world.

Saturday, April 09, 2011

The Selection Phase

I'm pleased to welcome all of our talented 42 proposing students for another edition of Google/Umit Summer of Code! We're looking for an awesome Summer of Code, and with the students we have at hand, I'm pretty sure we will!

As first thing, I would like to congratulate you all for been here. Though we're not past the selection phase yet, you are already a winner. Most people don't even take the time post their proposal and take the risks. But remember: "If you don't risk anything, you risk even more. (Erica Jong)". So, glad to have winners with us on board, and looking forward for having you all involved with Umit and our goals on helping people by delivering good software.

Our goal now is to get to know each other, have you guys to know the project better (hey, you've got to know if you want to work with us!) and get everyone selected for our Summer programs.

So that you all know, Umit Project is a project that started with Google Summer of Code 2005 when I participated as a student for Insecure.org developing the Umit Network Scanner. I participated again as a student in 2006, and in 2007 I founded the Umit Project Open Source Organization, and we began to participate as a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code.

As you all know, Google's resources aren't infinite, and they can't afford to have us mentoring all students that apply. We're extremely happy with whatever amount of slots they give us, but at the other hand we feel sorrow for having to let go so many talented students that otherwise could be here helping us change something in the world. For this reason, in 2009 we inaugurated our own Summer of Code program, called Umit Summer of Code. The goal is the same, but since we don't make any money as an organization, we can't afford to award our students with money. Instead, we offer Google swag (the t-shirt and perhaps something else - Special thanks to Ellen Ko and Carol Smith from Google, that have always cared about USoC and provided all support we needed to help our students), 2 mentors, participation certificate and recommendation letters for all of the participants. In addition, we also offer all the meanings for launching your project in a well stablished Open Source Community and help you guys spread the word about it once it is delivered. We know that money is a strong motivation, and even a meaning for having you guys to dedicate the time on our project, but USoC has proven that money isn't everything. Though not officially in Umit Summer of Code, Devtar participated in 2007 as a volunteer writing the Bluetooth Scanner, in 2008 after showing his talents with his volunteer work, he was chosen as a student for Google Summer of Code and the other year he became a mentor for Umit Project. We have also Niteesh and Ganja, that we couldn't accept for GSoC, but decided to participate as USoC students last year. They conducted an awesome job with the proposal they set themselves to accomplish, and they're back this year willing to participate once again as *USoC* students. These guys inspire the Open Source Community!

It is not a requirement to work first on USoC and then on GSoC. But if it happens that we can't have you for GSoC, try your best to stick with us on USoC and we'll make our best to pay back your efforts!

So, this is how it is going to work this year: We've got 42 students and 8 mentors, but we don't know how many slots Google will be able to grant us with. We'll do our best to select the students based on their participation during the selection phase (that ranges from today to April 22), by interacting, asking you questions about your proposals and your background and evaluating your participations in our hackathon (http://trac.umitproject.org/wiki/hackathon - We have one going on just *right now*). Then, we'll figure how many slots Google has to offer us, and we'll finish the ranking by selecting the projects that makes more sense for the organization. The makes more sense, is a balance between interest of the organization in the project and the evaluation of the students we have at hand to develop the given project. Google is been very generous to us, and we can't afford to have students into GSoC that we may feel that are going to fail or quit. If you (or we) are in doubt, then we have USoC for getting to know each other a bit better, and still have everyone getting most of the benefits of the GSoC program. But again, if you don't make it into GSoC, it doesn't mean that we don't trust you'll make it. We have limited slots for GSoC and several aspects to evaluate in order to prioritize the slots.

We wish you all a great Summer! Let's work hard together, and we may contribute with valuable software to the world!

Friday, April 01, 2011

Google Summer of Code 2011

It is with great excitement that we come to announce that is on, and Umit Project is one of its ! If you're interested in applying for developing one of our ideas, hurry! If you need any help, just get in touch with us in our development mailing list, or irc channel (#umit @ irc.freenode.net).

This year we've got The Coolest Summer Project of Your Life. Make sure you check it out! You''l find a quick summary of The Coolest Summer Project of Your Life in the video below.

Watch our video made specially for this GSoC!