GSoC
1. Describe your organization.
TOPLAP is an umbrella organisation, consisting of developers and performers from the live coding community. Live coders write software to generate live video and music, often in front of a lie audience but also as part of a solitary compositional process. The liveness is allowed by dynamically interpreted languages, which allow source code changes to be picked up without restarts. A live coding session thus allows the fast action-reaction modifications demanded by creative tasks such as music and video improvisation.
We have a few hundred members on our mailing list with an active core of around 50. Our members include the in developers of popular open source live coding languages including ChucK, Fluxus and SuperCollider, as well as those learning live coding languages.
TOPLAP was formed in the year 2004, and has brought together live coders to discuss philosophical issues around live coding and seed collaboration. We have organised several international meetings including the Changing Grammars workshop in Hamburg, DE, the LOSS LiveCode festival in Sheffield, UK, and sub-events of Transmediale festival, the Make Art festival in Poitiers, France, the International Computer Music Conference in Dublin, Ireland and several smaller events. These have all involved talks, beginners workshops as well as performances.
2. Why is your organization applying to participate in GSoC 2009? What do you hope to gain by participating?
We have two aims in 2009, firstly to bring the different strands of live coding closer, and to bring live coding to more people. The first aim is partly technical -- it is currently difficult to achieve time sync between different pieces of live coding software, or even different instances of the same software. We started the 'netclock' project in 2008, which could benefit greatly from the GSoC programme.
We would also gain from being seen as taken seriously by google as a free software project. Livecoding languages are heralded by some computer scientists as fine languages in their own right, but are still not widely known in the free software world.
3. Did your organization participate in past GSoCs? If so, please summarize your involvement and the successes and challenges of your participation.
No.
4. If your organization has not previously participated in GSoC, have you applied in the past? If so, for what year(s)?
This is our first application.
5. What license(s) does your project use?
GPL and LGPL
6. What is the URL for your ideas page?
http://toplap.org/index.php/GSoCIdeas
7. What is the main development mailing list or forum for your organization?
http://toplap.org/index.php/MailingList
8. What is the main IRC channel for your organization?
- toplap on irc.freenode.net
9. Does your organization have an application template you would like to see students use? If so, please provide it now.
TODO
10. Who will be your backup organization administrator? Please include Google Account information.
- ?
11. Who will your mentors be? Please include Google Account information.
- ?
12. What criteria did you use to select these individuals as mentors? Please be as specific as possible.
- Very active developers of popular open source live coding languages, namely Fluxus, ChucK and SuperCollider
13. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing students?
- Keep many communication channels including phone number to attempt to contact students
14. What is your plan for dealing with disappearing mentors?
- Ensure students have organisation contact to report difficulty in contacting mentors
- Find out reason for disappearance as possible (we only anticipate serious reasons as mentors are aware of work involved)
- Reallocate to alternative mentor if at all possible
- Keep google informed
15. What steps will you take to encourage students to interact with your project's community before, during and after the program?
- Encourage open discussion of projects with other members on the mailing list
- Involve community in discussion of projects prior to selection
16. What will you do to ensure that your accepted students stick with the project after GSoC concludes?
- Encourage students to attend planned live coding festivals/conferences to discuss outcomes of their work
- Offer gigging opportunities!