Privly Google Summer of Code

The Privly Foundation would like to welcome everyone to the Privly Google Summer of Code 2015.

Information for Students

How to participate in the Google Summer of Code

Instructions on how to participate in the Google Summer of Code are available from the main GSOC site which is used for managing the program. The FAQs provides a lot of useful information about the program and how it works. Interested students should subscribe to the GSOC discussion list. Finally, there is a Student Guide that should be essential reading for any student interested in participating in the Google Summer of Code.

Why Privly for the Google Summer of Code?

Our organization will not only give you valuable experience with open source software, it will also raise your awareness about Internet privacy, and the technologies we can build together to reclaim it.

Additionally, Privly is started and run by doctoral students in computer science. Therefore, we are "near-peers" for you. We can mentor you about applying to graduate school, and we will help you use your Privly experience as fodder for other internship and university applications. Since, we were just undergraduates 7 years ago, we still remember what it's like to be an undergraduate student, and we will be able to relate to (and provide mentoring for) you!

Privly is tackling many large issues that could be research projects for students, as we build novel solution for Internet privacy.

Finally, we have two very good resources on our Privly Foundation who will prove to be invaluable to you.

• Leslie Hawthorn is a well-known community manager with ElasticSearch. She also used to be the GSOC program manager. She has the skills, network, and passion for helping our students succeed.
• Carlos Jensen is a professor in human-computer interaction and has a passion for Internet privacy. He is committed to helping our undergraduates succeed.

About the Privly Foundation

The founding purpose of the Privly Foundation is to empower the Privly community to participate in and contribute to privacy software projects by fostering awareness of privacy issues and building a community of mutual support around Privly development. The Privly foundation was founded following a successful crowdfunding round in 2012.

Privly has 3 founding board members:

Sean McGregor is the creator and lead developer for the Privly project. A native of the United States, McGregor is a PhD candidate in computer science at Oregon State University. In 2008, McGregor earned a Bachelor of Arts from Claremont McKenna College, with studies in computer science, environmental policy, government, and economics.

Leslie Hawthorn is an internationally known community manager, speaker and author, Leslie Hawthorn has spent the past decade creating, cultivating and enabling open source communities. She created the world’s first initiative to involve pre-university students in open source software development, launched Google’s #2 Developer Blog, received an O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2010 and gave a few great talks on many things open source. In August 2013, she joined Elasticsearch as Community Manager, where she leads community relations efforts.

Carlos Jensen is an Associate Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Oregon State University (OSU). He received his B.S. degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) Brockport, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2005, where he was a member of the Graphics, Visualization and Usability Center (GVU). His research includes work on Usable Privacy and Security (HCISec), with a particular focus on making online decisions about privacy and security understandable and meaningful to users. He also does research related to open source communities.

Privly Foundation Projects

Core development focuses on the Chrome browser extension and the Rails-based content server, however these are "reference implementations" for a general approach referred to as "application injection." With application injection, content is viewed in the context of web sites like Facebook without giving the web site operator access to the content's scripting environment. The result is a seamless integration of secure content and unaffiliated web applications.

The emphasis of Privly's GSOC ideas are to build the Chrome extension and related infrastructure to support more advanced privacy and security applications. OTR, PGP, and non-security applications like IRC could all be implemented on the Privly stack and are available for a GSOC project.

How to connect with the Privly community

The best way to reach our community and designated mentors for support and questions is through our IRC channel, #privly on irc.freenode.net. For those without a chat client, freenode has a web-based chat page. Please send any questions you may have and please identify yourself as a GSOC participant and you will be warmly received (if not, please let us know). We require all students to subscribe to our main development mailing list.

We have a development guide on the priv.ly site. All announcements will be made through our discussion list and/or on the Privly Foundation website.

For more information, contact Privly's Google Summer of Code Program Administrators: community at privly dot org

Project Ideas

Privly Foundation GSOC Ideas Page.

Student Guidelines

Both new and prior contributors to the Privly Foundation projects will be considered as applicants. Students should submit a bug fix for the project first. (Please engage with proposed mentors to identify an appropriate bug that will demonstrate your skills and capabilities). Students should get involved with projects now. Visit 2016 Privly GSOC Student Guidelines for a full list of student guidelines, including the required application template.

Mentor Responsibilities

Interested in mentoring? We are recruiting experienced Privly contributors - both developers and domain experts, to serve as mentors this year. We will assign two mentors to every project - a primary technical mentor (an experienced Privly developer) and a backup who may be a domain expert or another technical resource - which helps balance the time commitment required to be able to effectively contribute.

Interested mentors should review the GSOC Mentoring Guide

Note: Mentors will be responsible for reviewing & merging student code into our main codebases after the end of GSOC.

See Privly's GSOC Mentor Responsibilities for more information.