[iRail] [isoc] iRail Summer Of Code & hiring jobstudents

[Pieter Colpaert]

Hey iRailers,

First of all, don't forget to put our General Assembly in your agendas:
the 29th of June, in the evening, in Brussels.

Now on topic: 

In July there are a lot of people who're going to do a lot of work on
certain iRail-projects (a lot of us are students and July is just
perfect). A second thing I've noticed, I hope you did too, is that iRail
is vastly growing. Thus we need better projectmanagement:
project.iRail.be is just not good enough anymore and some of our
projects get too little visibility. The API needs better documentation
and it needs a more consistent specification.

Therefore our NPO is going to organise iRail Summer Of Code! The 4th of
July will be the start for a lot of improvements!


1. iRail Projects!
-------------------

I've heard a lot of ideas for projects at Apps For Ghent, on irc, in
real life... But a lot of ideas really never get developed. Therefore
the iRail Summer of Code will be a perfect opportunity to make ideas
happen!

There are 10 kind of people in the world: those who have ideas and never
seem to find the time to execute them and those who are in search of
ideas and a job to execute ideas. Out of convenience we will call the
latter "students" and call the first "promoters".

A promoter can be anyone who has an idea. For instance a company X
wanted to have a system on their website which links their ERP system to
the iRail API to see whether an employee can take the bus to his/her
appointment at a certain time. This company, who acts as a promoter, can
ask an iRail-person to act a student and implement this idea. We will
find a person quicker if the payrate for this student is higher. The
student can work at the Hackerspace of Ghent and get reallife support by
our iRailmembers (and jobstudents, see chapter 2). If you can find or if
you are a company like this, mail info at iRail.be.

A promoter can as well be someone who doesn't have time, nor money, but
wants to get this idea done. For instance, Tim Besard, Chistophe
Versieux and Bart Bruynooghe are working on BeTrains for Nokia, Samsung
and Android. They can be promoters for these clients and ask a student
to help them out for a certain time during July. In exchange for this we
can offer other benefits than money: reallife support and a good teacher
for the android platform, symbian platform of bada platform who already
have a lot of experience and a lot of test-devices.

We will also try to get some overall benefits if you come to the
hackerspace from 9 to 5 to work as a student or promoter: We'll try to
refund your public transport tickets and we'll feed you. Of course all
this still depends on the reply I'm going to get from companies such as
De Lijn and NMBS, but let's stay positive.


2. The "boring" work
---------------------

To do the "boring" work we'll hire jobstudents. The boring work
includes:
  * Setting up a whole new project-management system in which anyone can
contribute easily.
  * Setting up showcase on which new iRail-projects can be easily
introduced with a quick way to give feedback, go to the downloadpage,
download the source, contact the people behind it...
  * Documenting the iRail API and iRail projects
  * Moving towards a more generic codebase in which semantic
webstandards and relational combination of information is easily
implementable (in fact, this will be my job, as a part of my thesis)
  * Implementing De Lijn, MIVB and NS in the current API
  * Building an intermodal system in which all 4 API's can be combined

The requirements for becoming an iRail jobstudent:
   - You've worked with iRail before
   - You've got at least a bachelor degree engineering in computer
science (We can talk about this)
   - You're a student

So far we've got 2 applicants. If you're interested in a studentjob,
feel free to contact info at iRail.be. The students will have to come and
introduce themselves on the iRail general assembly the 29th of June. We
will all decide together whether the student is hired or not.

At this moment I'm talking to some people about "investing in" (more
like sponsoring) the iRail-project. Where we will get the money from and
how many we will have still depends on several possible partners. On the
general assembly we'll announce the "sponsors". As well for these
sponsors we will have a vote on whether we can accept them or not (how
democratic!).

Wrapping up
------------

That's it! Before making a lot of buzz on isoc, this is merely a
proposal. I would like to hear anyone's ideas/comments/objections first.

Thanks in advance,

Pieter Colpaert

P.S. I've made a quick draft on the wiki:
http://project.iRail.be/wiki/isoc

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