Skip to content

GitLab

Last edited by Gus
Page history

GSoC

The following is a page to help with GSoC / SoP / Outreachy coordination.

GSoC & Outreachy 2021

Student Primary Mentor Backup Mentor IRC Nick Passed Project
Apratim Ranjan Chakrabarty Barkin (woswos) Georg (GeKo) _ranchak_ Alexa Top Sites Captcha and Tor Block Monitoring
Kulsoom Zahra Gus - kulsoom_z - Help Tor Project support our users

GSoC & Outreachy 2020

Student Primary Mentor Backup Mentor IRC Nick Passed Project
Barkin Simsek Georg (GeKo) Roger (arma) woswos yes Cloudflare CAPTCHA Monitoring (OSC Hub link)
Krona Emmanuel sarath hellais yes Hub OONI Social Media Sharing
Hashik Donthineni cohosh phw HashikD yes Snowflake Proxy on Android (OSC Hub link)
Aya Hany hiro antonela aya Privacy Friendly web
c nickm ahf Caitlin Improve Tor Relay IPv6 Network Support (Outreachy page)
Joydeep Gus - championquizzer Outreachy page
Maria Violante ahf - mariav - Anonymous GitLab Ticketing

Schedule

  • 1st status update: N/A
  • 2nd status update: N/A
  • First phase evaluation: June 29th - July 3rd
  • 3rd status update: N/A
  • 4th status update: N/A
  • Second phase evaluation: July 27th - 31st
  • 5th status update: N/A
  • 6th status update: N/A
  • GSoC finals: August 31st - September 7th

Status Reports

SoP 2018

Student Primary Mentor Backup Mentor IRC Nick Passed Project
Stelios Barberakis Juha Nurmi (numes) George (asn) chefarov Yes Ahmia - Onion Service Search
Dave Rolek Damian Johnson (Atagar) Teor dmr Yes Python Tor Client
Juga Matt Traudt (Pastly) Teor Juga Yes Bandwidth Scanner

Tor Browser Fingerprinting Project

Student Primary Mentor Backup Mentor IRC Nick Project
Student of L Jean Camp Georg (GeKo) Arthur (arthuredelstein) Vendo Tor Browser fingerprint randomization

Schedule

  • 1st status update: May 25th
  • 2nd status update: June 8th
  • First phase evaluation: June 11-15th
  • 3rd status update: June 22nd
  • 4th status update: July 6th
  • Second phase evaluation: July 9-13th
  • 5th status update: July 20th
  • 6th status update: August 3rd
  • SoP final evaluation: August 14-August 21

Status Reports

GSoC 2017

Student Primary Mentor Backup Mentor IRC Nick Passed Project
Felipe Dau David Stainton (dawuud) meejah dau yes unMessage
Iry Sukhbir (sukhe) Patrick Schleizer iry yes anon-connection-wizard
Nur-Magomed Dzhamiev Tom Ritter Georg (gk) nmago yes Crash Reporter for Tor Browser
Pushkar Pathak Juha Nurmi (numes) George (asn) mdhash yes Improving Ahmia - Hidden Service Search

Schedule

  • 1st status update: June 9th
  • 2nd status update: June 23rd
  • First phase evaluation: June 26-30th
  • 3rd status update: July 7th
  • 4th status update: July 21st
  • Second phase evaluation: July 24-28th
  • 5th status update: August 4th
  • 6th status update: August 18th
  • GSoC finals: August 29-September 5th

Status Reports

GSoC 2016

Student Primary Mentor Backup Mentor IRC Nick Passed Project
Amogh Pradeep Nathan Hans amoghbl1 yes Orfox
Huy Vu Marcela (masomel) Arlo (arlolra) c633 yes CONIKS for Tor Messenger
Ismael Riahi Juha Nurmi (numes) George (asn) zma yes Ahmia search engine for hidden services
Mridul Malpotra Philipp (phw) Damian (atagar) mtyamantau no Exitmap improvements project
Pierre Laperdrix Georg (GeKo) Günes Acar, Nicolas (boklm) SuperOctopus yes Fingerprint Central
Sambuddha Basu Damian (atagar) Sebastian sambuddhabasu1 no Expand Nyx
segfault anonym George (asn) segfault yes Tails Server

Schedule

  • 1st status update: June 3rd
  • 2nd status update: June 17th
  • GSoC midterms: June 20-27th
  • 3rd status update: July 1st
  • 4th status update: July 15th
  • 5th status update: July 29th
  • 6th status update: August 12th
  • GSoC finals: August 23-29th

Status Reports

SoP 2015

For 2015 ran our own program instead of GSoC (program announcement, selected applications).

Student Primary Mentor Backup Mentor IRC Nick Passed Project
Donncha O'Cearbhaill David George DonnchaC yes Load Balancing/High Availability Onion Services
Jesse Victors Yawning George kernelcorn yes The Onion Name System
Israel Leiva Sukhbir Nima ilv yes Enhance GetTor
Cristobal Leiva Damian Arturo clv yes Relay Web Dashboard

Summer Schedule

The following schedule is being used by Donncha and Jesse.

  • Projects officially start: May 25th
  • 1st status update: June 5th
  • 2st status update: June 19th
  • 3st status update and midterm evaluation: July 3rd
  • 4st status update: July 17th
  • 5st status update: July 31th
  • 6st status update: August 14th
  • 7st status update: August 28th
  • End-of-term evaluation: September 1st

Winter Schedule

The following schedule is being used by Israel and Cristobal.

  • Projects officially start: July 6th
  • 1st status update: July 17th
  • 2st status update: July 31st
  • 3st status update and midterm evaluation: August 14th
  • 4st status update: August 28th
  • 5st status update: September 11th
  • 6st status update: September 25th
  • 7st status update: October 9th
  • End-of-term evaluation: October 13th

Status Reports

GSoC 2014

Student Primary Mentor Backup Mentor IRC Nick Passed Project
Juha Nurmi George Moritz ahmia yes Ahmia.fi - Search Engine for Hidden Services
Christian Schulz Karsten Sathya rndm no Integrating Compass into Globe
Amogh Pradeep Nathan Sathya amoghbl1 yes Orbot & Orfox
Jacob Haven Philipp Winter Arturo jhaven no A Lightweight Censorship Analyser for Tor/OONI
Israel Leiva Sukhbir Nima ilv yes Revamp GetTor
Noah Rahman Vmon Zackw selimthegrim no Stegotorus security enhancement
Sreenatha Bhatlapenumarthi Meejah Karsten lucyd yes Rewrite Tor Weather
Kostas Jakeliunas Isis Matthew Finkel wfn no Tor BridgeDB Twitter Distributor
Marc Juarez Mike Yawning mjuarezm yes A Framework for Website Fingerprinting Countermeasures
Quinn Jarrell Ximin David Fifield RushingWookie yes Building a pluggable transport combiner
Daniel Martí Nick Sebastian mvdan yes Implement consensus diffs
towelenee Nick Sebastian towelenee yes Tor daemon optimization
Zack Mullaly Yan Peter redwire yes A secure ruleset update mechanism for HTTPSEverywhere

Schedule

  • 1st status update: June 6th
  • 2nd status update: June 20th
  • GSoC midterms: June 23-27th
  • 3rd status update: July 4th
  • 4th status update: July 18th
  • 5th status update: August 1st
  • 6th status update: August 15th
  • GSoC finals: August 18-22nd

Status Reports

GSoC 2013

Student Primary Mentor Backup Mentor IRC Nick Passed Project
Kostas Jakeliunas Karsten Damian wfn yes Searchable Tor descriptor archive
Chang Lan Steven George clan no Build Better Pluggable Transports
Hareesan Sukhbir Moritz hareesh yes Steganography Browser Addon
Cristian Toader Nick Andrea ctoader yes Run With Limited Capabilities Project
Lisa Micah Dan lisacyao yes HTTPS Everywhere Mixed Content Detection and Handling
Robert Mike Aaron ra yes Improvements on latency, bandwidth and anonymity in the Tor network
Johannes Fürmann Arturo Moritz waaaaargh yes Create an Internet Censorship Virtual Machine Based Simulator

Schedule

  • 1st status update: June 28th
  • 2nd status update: July 12th
  • 3rd status update: July 26th
  • GSoC midterms: July 29th - August 2nd
  • 4th status update: August 9th
  • 5th status update: August 23th
  • 6th status update: September 6th
  • 7th status update: September 20th
  • GSoC finals: September 23rd - 27th

Status Reports

GSoC 2012

Student Primary Mentor Backup Mentor IRC Nick Passed Project
Ravi Padmala Damian Sathyanarayanan neena yes Stem Improvements and Arm Port
Feroze Naina Tomás Sebastian feroze yes Implementing Hidden Service Configuration
Michele Orrù Arturo George maker-kun yes Anonymous Python Application Framework
Brandon Wiley George Nick blanu yes Pluggable Transports in Python
vmon Zack Weinberg Roger vmon yes Stegotorus
Julien Voisin intrigeri anonym jvoisin no Tails Server

Status Reports

Org Admin Checklist

The following is a cheat sheet for being an org admin for Google Summer of Code. Please add things that we're missing as we go along through the year.

  • Org Application Phase
  • Revise GSoC page and project ideas
  • https://www.torproject.org/about/gsoc.html.en
  • https://www.torproject.org/getinvolved/volunteer.html.en#Coding
  • Ask potential mentors for new project ideas and to update old ones
  • Make an initial plea-of-marginal-effectiveness
  • Follow up a week later with individual nagging
  • Apply revisions and remove mentors who weren't responsive
  • Revise and submit org application to Google
  • Org Acceptance
  • Blog posting (examples: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016)
  • Email tor-talk@, tor-dev@, and libtech@ (2013 example, 2014 example)
  • Student Selection
  • Initial pass through applications
  • Flag spam applications
  • Make summary of the projects and assign potential primary mentor
  • Ask potential mentors to look them over and give feedback
  • Schedule meeting on IRC to discuss applications
  • Deduplication IRC meeting
  • Student Acceptance
  • Welcoming email
  • After introductions are in make a blog post (2012 example, 2016 example)

2020 Application Form

Your Details

Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code?

We are excited to have the opportunity to participate in GSoC for 2020. We have been involved with GSoC since 2007 and have seen the benefits that participating in this program can provide, both for us as a hosting organization and the students themselves.

Tor has many open development tasks that are well-suited to summer projects, and also many students who are excited to work on them. As a non-profit, we are used to engaging with volunteers for standalone projects which then become part of the larger Tor ecosystem.

In recent years, The Tor Project has continued to grow, offering interesting new opportunities for summer projects. We have already had interest from volunteers in getting involved with GSoC this year and expect to attract as many smart students as we have done in previous years.

We were disappointed to not have been selected for the past few years and we are determined to submit an exciting new list of projects for 2020.

How many potential mentors have agreed to mentor this year?

1-5

How will you keep mentors engaged with their students?

Each project that we are putting forward this year has been proposed by the mentor as something that they are invested in succeeding. Each of these mentors have been leading his or her own projects related to Tor, and they are the most suited for mentoring students working on those modules. Some of our mentors are actually former GSoC students!

We have a structure in place, from our many years of previous participation in GSoC, whereby mentors and mentees check in regularly to ensure that both parties are engaged with the project. This year we will also require mentors to check in regulary with the organisation administrator to share progress and ensure that, if there are any issues, these can be solved promptly.

We additionally plan to assign two mentors per student to provide redundancy in case anything goes wrong. In general, our chosen mentors are Tor staff or have been working on Tor for multiple years now (and for many of them, it's their full or part time job).

=== How will you help your students stay on schedule to complete their projects? ===

We understand that in order for students to stay on schedule they need to be engaged and invested in their projects, we hope to capitalise on this by picking students who have already demonstrated commitment and/or interest to our community. Further, having multiple mentors per student can hopefully give us a better shot at keeping the students on track.

As part of the student application process, we will ask students to break down their project into manageable steps, ideally with timelines. This is a pre-requisite first step before any work is started. We will use this timeline to track progress throughout the project.

We will ensure that students have a regular check in time with their mentors in order to check status and share any blockers. We will encourage students to be open about any issues that they may encounter so that a solution may be found.

We will also require our students to write bi-weekly status updates with the community to keep us informed of their progress.

How will you get your students involved in your community during GSoC?

We encourage GSoC students to start off by interacting with us on IRC to help us get to know them and them to get to know our community.

Tor already has an active community on IRC and the mailing lists, and there's also an active research community of scientists trying to improve security of systems like Tor. We can draw on this community---the current active Tor volunteers as well as the graduate and undergraduate students at the research institutions to engage with our GSoC students.

Further, we require our students to introduce themselves to the community, and to make periodic status reports available in a public format. Each development team at Tor has weekly team meetings on IRC. GSoC students will be attached to a particular development team at Tor depending on their mentor and project and will be encouraged to participate in these weekly meetings to share their progress and any blockers on their project.

How will you keep students involved with your community after GSoC?

We have quite a good track record of past GSoC mentees staying on as volunteers and contributing code, some have even ended up becoming core contributors to Tor.

From past experience, the students that were most invested in their project and our development community were the most likely to stick around after the GSoC program ended. Our plan is to encourage them to actively participate in discussions and connect with the community throughout the course of GSoC in order to improve their chances of staying on after the summer has ended.

=== Has your org been accepted as a mentor org in Google Summer of Code before? ===

Yes

=== Which years did your org participate in GSoC? ===

2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016, 2017

=== For each year your organization has participated, provide the counts of successful and total students.===

2007: 4/4 2008: 4/7 2009: 5/6 2010: 5/6 2011: 7/7 2012: 5/6 2013: 6/7 2014: 9/13 2016: 5/7 2017: 4/4

Refer an Organisation (optional)

Is there an organization new to GSoC that you would like to refer to the program for 2020? Feel free to add a few words about why they'd be a good fit.

If your org has applied for GSoC before but not been accepted, select the years:

2019, 2018 and 2015

What year was your project started?

2002

Where does your source code live?

https://gitweb.torproject.org/

Is your organization part of any government?

No

Anything else we should know (optional)?

Organisation Profile

Organisation Administrators

pili (Primary), arma (Backup 1), atagar (Backup 2)

Organization (Public) Profile

Name

The Tor Project, Inc

Website url

https://www.torproject.org/

Tagline

We defend your privacy online through free software and open networks.

Logo URL

Primary Open Source License

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License (BSD-3-Clause)

Organisation Category

Web - Change from last year when it was "Security"

Technology tags

c, python, javascript, rust

Topic tags

security, privacy, anonymity, anti-censorship

Ideas list

Descriptions

See https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/help/org-profile#descriptions for an example of how these are used.

Short description

We are the Tor Project, a 501(c)3 US nonprofit. We advance human rights and defend your privacy online through free software and open networks.

Long Description

The Tor Project is a free-software non-profit project to build an anonymity toolkit used by individuals, companies, governments, and law enforcement around the world. The Tor network has grown since its start in 2002 to several million active users pushing over 60 Gbps of traffic. The Tor Project has a staff of 45 developers, researchers, and advocates, plus several dozen volunteers who help out on a daily basis.

Proposals

Application Instructions

Please use the following template for your application:

  • What project would you like to work on?Use our ideas lists as a starting point or make up your own idea. Your proposal should include high-level descriptions of what you're going to do, with more details about the parts you expect to be tricky. Your proposal should also try to break down the project into tasks of a fairly fine granularity.
  • Point us to a code sample: ideally from an existing project.
  • Why do you want to work with The Tor Project in particular?
  • Tell us about your experiences in free software development environments. We especially want to hear examples of how you have collaborated with others.
  • Will your project need more work or maintenance after the summer ends? Is it likely you will stay and help out after?
  • What is your ideal approach to keeping everybody informed of your progress, problems, and questions throughout the project?
  • What school are you attending? What year are you, and what's your major/degree/focus? Please specify if you're part of a research group
  • How can we contact you to ask you further questions? In addition, what's your IRC nickname? Interacting with us on IRC will help us get to know you, and help you get to know our community.
  • Are you applying to other projects for GSoC and, if so, what would be your preference if accepted to both? Having a stated preference will not impact if we accept your application or not.
  • Anything else that we should know?

=== Proposal tags ===

ooni, onion services, snowflake, stem, tor browser

== Contact Methods ==

=== Chat ===

https://www.torproject.org/about/contact.html.en#irc

Mailing List

https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation#MailingLists

General Email

frontdesk@rt.torproject.org

== Links ==

=== Twitter URL ===

https://twitter.com/@TorProject

Blog URL

https://blog.torproject.org/

2019 Application Form

Organisation Administrators

pili (Primary), arma (Backup 1), atagar (Backup 2)

Organization (Public) Profile

Name

The Tor Project, Inc

Website url

https://www.torproject.org/

Tagline

We defend your privacy online through free software and open networks.

Logo URL

[https://www.torproject.org//images/tor-logo.png]

Primary Open Source License

BSD 3-Clause "New" or "Revised" License (BSD-3-Clause)

Organisation Category

Security

Technology tags

c, python, javascript

Topic tags

security, privacy, anonymity, anti-censorship

Ideas list

https://www.torproject.org/about/gsoc.html.en

Descriptions

See https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/help/org-profile#descriptions for an example of how these are used.

Short description

We are the Tor Project, a 501(c)3 US nonprofit. We advance human rights and defend your privacy online through free software and open networks.

Long Description

The Tor Project is a free-software non-profit project to build an anonymity toolkit used by individuals, companies, governments, and law enforcement around the world. The Tor network has grown since its start in 2002 to several million active users pushing over 60 Gbps of traffic. The Tor Project has a staff of 45 developers, researchers, and advocates, plus several dozen volunteers who help out on a daily basis.

Proposals

Application Instructions

Please use the following template for your application:

  • What project would you like to work on?Use our ideas lists as a starting point or make up your own idea. Your proposal should include high-level descriptions of what you're going to do, with more details about the parts you expect to be tricky. Your proposal should also try to break down the project into tasks of a fairly fine granularity.
  • Point us to a code sample: ideally from an existing project.
  • Why do you want to work with The Tor Project in particular?
  • Tell us about your experiences in free software development environments. We especially want to hear examples of how you have collaborated with others.
  • Will your project need more work or maintenance after the summer ends? Is it likely you will stay and help out after?
  • What is your ideal approach to keeping everybody informed of your progress, problems, and questions throughout the project?
  • What school are you attending? What year are you, and what's your major/degree/focus? Please specify if you're part of a research group
  • How can we contact you to ask you further questions? In addition, what's your IRC nickname? Interacting with us on IRC will help us get to know you, and help you get to know our community.
  • Are you applying to other projects for GSoC and, if so, what would be your preference if accepted to both? Having a stated preference will not impact if we accept your application or not.
  • Anything else that we should know?

=== Proposal tags ===

ooni, onion services, snowflake, stem, tor browser

== Contact Methods ==

=== Chat ===

https://www.torproject.org/about/contact.html.en#irc

Mailing List

https://www.torproject.org/docs/documentation#MailingLists

General Email

frontdesk@rt.torproject.org

== Links ==

=== Twitter URL ===

https://twitter.com/@TorProject

Blog URL

https://blog.torproject.org/

Organisation Application

Why does your org want to participate in Google Summer of Code?

We are excited to have the opportunity to once again participate in Google Summer of Code for 2019. We have been involved with GSoC since 2007 and have seen the benefits that participating in this program can provide, both for us as a hosting organization and the students themselves.

Tor has many open development tasks that are well-suited to summer projects, and also many students who are excited to work on them. As a non-profit organisation we are used to engaging with volunteers for these sorts of standalone projects which then become part of the larger Tor ecosystem. GSoC can help these students work on important new free software work while also paying rent.

In recent years, The Tor Project has continued to grow, offering interesting new opportunities for summer projects. We expect to attract as many smart students as we have done in previous years.

How will you keep mentors engaged with their students?

Each project that we are putting forward this year has been proposed by the mentor as something that they are invested in succeeding. Each of these mentors have been leading his or her own projects related to Tor, and they are the most suited for mentoring students working on those modules. Some of our mentors are actually former GSoC students!

We have a structure in place, from our many years of previous participation in GSoC, whereby mentors and mentees check in regularly to ensure that both parties are engaged with the project. This year we will also require mentors to check in regulary with the organisation administrator to share progress and ensure that, if there are any issues, these can be solved promptly.

We additionally plan to assign two mentors per student to provide redundancy in case anything goes wrong. In general, our chosen mentors are Tor staff or have been working on Tor for multiple years now (and for many of them, it's their full or part time job).

How will you help your students stay on schedule to complete their projects?

We understand that in order for students to stay on schedule they need to be engaged and invested in their projects, we hope to capitalise on this by picking students who have already demonstrated commitment and/or interest to our community. Further, having multiple mentors per student can hopefully give us a better shot at keeping the students' on track.

As part of the student application process, we will ask students to break down their project into manageable steps, ideally with timelines. This is a pre-requisite first step before any work is started. We will use this timeline to track progress throughout the project.

We will ensure that students have a regular check in time with their mentors in order to check status and share any blockers. We will encourage students to be open about any issues that they may encounter so that a solution may be found.

We will also require our students to write bi-weekly status updates with the community to keep us informed of their progress.

How will you get your students involved in your community during GSoC?

We encourage GSoC students to start off by interacting with us on IRC to help us get to know them and them to get to know our community.

Tor already has an active community on IRC and the mailing lists, and there's also an active research community of scientists trying to improve security of systems like Tor. We can draw on this community---the current active Tor volunteers as well as the graduate and undergraduate students at the research institutions to engage with our GSoC students.

Further, we require our students to introduce themselves to the community, and to make periodic status reports available in a public format.

How will you keep students involved with your community after GSoC?

We have quite a good track record of past GSoC mentees staying on as volunteers and contributing code, some have even ended up becoming core contributors to Tor.

From past experience, the students that were most invested in their project and our development community were the most likely to stick around after the GSoC program ended. Our plan is to encourage them to actively participate in discussions and connect with the community throughout the course of GSoC in order to improve their chances of staying on after the summer has ended.

Has your org been accepted as a mentor org in Google Summer of Code before?

Yes.

Years

2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017

For each year your organization has participated, provide the counts of successful and total students. (e.g. 2016: 3/4)

2007: 4/4 2008: 4/7 2009: 5/6 2010: 5/6 2011: 7/7 2012: 5/6 2013: 6/7 2014: 9/13 2016: 5/7 2017: 4/4

If your org has applied for GSoC before but not been accepted, select the years:

2018 and 2015

What year was your project started?

2002

Where does your source code live?

https://gitweb.torproject.org/

Anything else we should know (optional)?

= Archived questions and answers =

If you chose "veteran" in the dropdown above, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation. Please also list your pass/fail rate for each year.

We participated in GSoC 2007 through 2014. In 2007 we had a pretty successful group of four students. We had one student working on making Tor servers scale better (and not crash!) on Windows, one working on a library and tool to choose paths through the network according to various rules like "cross at most one ocean", one working on a fuzzing library to look for parsing problems (it's found three so far), and one working on a new way to improve scalability and privacy for Tor hidden services. All four passed and have produced useful code.

The 2008 GSoC was a success, too. One of our successful GSoC 2008 students has written a nice blog post reviewing how GSoC went for him, for the other students, and for the project in general: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/google-summer-code-2008-review

In 2009, we had 5 students to work on Tor, plus 1 more working for The Electronic Frontier Foundation. We had to pick these 6 out of 32 applications, which was a pretty hard process for us. In retrospect, there were at least 2 more students that we'd really have wanted to work on Tor but that we were not able to pick. Fortunately, they stuck with the project anyway, with one writing a neat relay monitor (and who is now our primary gsoc admin!) and one helping reimplement Tor in Java for mobile devices. We wrote a wrap-up report how GSoC 2009 went for us here: https://blog.torproject.org/blog/gsoc-wrapup-2009

In 2010 we had 4 students work on Tor and 2 more with the EFF. Unfortunately one disappeared shortly after being accepted, but all the rest were successful and greatly benefited the projects they worked on (jtor, soat, torbel, metrics, and switzerland). A couple of these students also wrote blog posts summarizing their summer:

https://blog.torproject.org/blog/torbel-tor-bulk-exit-list-tools https://blog.torproject.org/blog/tor-metrics-google-summer-code-2010

In 2011 we had 6 students to work on Tor and 1 more with the EFF. Two of those students (George and Sathyanarayanan) stayed afterward and became core Tor developers. Everyone was successful and some blogged about their experiences at...

http://inspirated.com/2011/10/04/summing-up-gsoc-2011 http://gsathya.in/blog/?p=107 https://blog.torproject.org/blog/gsoc-2011-metadata-anonymisation-toolkit https://blog.torproject.org/blogs/max-gsoc

In 2012 we had 6 students work with Tor. One had to leave the program soon after acceptance for personal reasons, but the rest were all successful. Starting this year we had students write bi-weekly status reports, you can find them on...

https://gitlab.torproject.org/tpo/team/-/wikis/GSoC

In 2013 we had 7 students, 2014 had 13 students, and ran the program in a similar fashion.

Stats for the success rate in prior years is: 4/4 in 2007, 4/7 in 2008, 5/6 in 2009, 5/6 in 2010, 7/7 in 2011, 5/6 in 2012, 6/7 in 2013, and 9/13 in 2014.

Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2014? What do you hope to gain by participating?

Tor has many open development tasks that are well-suited to summer projects, and also many students who are excited to work on them. GSoC can help these students work on important new free software work while also paying rent. In recent years The Tor Project has continued to grow, offering interesting new opportunities for summer projects. We expect to attract smart students as we did in prior years.

What is the main development mailing list for your organization?

https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-dev/

What is the main IRC channel for your organization?

irc://irc.oftc.net/tor-dev/

Twitter URL

https://twitter.com/torproject

What criteria did you use to select your mentors for this year's program? Please be as specific as possible.

Seth Schoen, Peter Eckersley, and Micah Lee, and Dan Auerbach are EFF Staff as listed on http://www.eff.org/about/staff. The remaining individuals have each worked with Tor, most of them for several years, and most of them are in the "core development team" listed on https://www.torproject.org/about/corepeople. Each individual has been leading his or her own projects related to Tor, and they are the most suited for mentoring students working on those modules. Note that five of our mentors and two of our admins are former GSoC students.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?

We hope to minimize the chances of disappearing students by picking students who have already demonstrated commitment and/or interest to our community. Further, having multiple mentors per student can hopefully give us a better shot at keeping the students' interest.

We want to learn about disappearing students as early as possible. Therefore, we are planning to require our students to write bi-weekly status updates to keep us informed of their progress.

What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?

Our plan is to assign two mentors per student to provide redundancy in case anything goes wrong. In general, our chosen mentors are EFF's staff or have been working on Tor for multiple years now (and for many of them, it's their full or part time job), so they're unlikely to just disappear.

What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before and during the program?

Tor already has an active community on IRC and the mailing lists, and there's also an active research community of scientists trying to improve security of systems like Tor. We can draw on this community---the current active Tor volunteers as well as the graduate and undergraduate students at the research institutions. Further, we require our students to introduce themselves to the community, and to make periodic status reports available in a public format.

What will you do to encourage that your accepted students stick with the project after Google Summer of Code concludes?

In past years the students that stuck around afterward were the ones most invested in their project and our development community. We plan to encourage them to actively participate in discussions and connect with the community to improve their chances of staying on after the summer has ended.