Tor: Google Summer of Code 2009

In the last two years, The Tor Project in collaboration with The Electronic Frontier Foundation successfully took part in Google Summer of Code 2007 and 2008. In total we had eleven students as full-time developers for the summers of 2007 and 2008.

Google has announced that there will also be a Google Summer of Code 2009, and we plan to apply. This page contains some information for interested students.

You must be self-motivated and able to work independently. We have a thriving community of interested developers on the IRC channel and mailing lists, and we're eager to work with you, brainstorm about design, and so on, but you need to be able to manage your own time, and you need to already be somewhat familiar with how free software development on the Internet works.

In addition to getting some more development work done on Tor and related applications, Google and Tor are most interested in getting students involved in Tor development in a way that keeps them involved after the summer too. As such, we will give priority to students who have demonstrated continued interest and responsiveness. We will require students to write public status report updates for our community, either by blogging or sending mail to our mailing list. We want to ensure that the community and the student can both benefit from each other.

Working on Tor is rewarding because:

You can work your own hours in your own locations. As long as you get the job done, we don't care about the process.
We only write free (open source) software. The tools you make won't be locked down or rot on a shelf.
You will work with a world-class team of anonymity experts and developers on what is already the largest and most active strong anonymity network ever.
The work you do could contribute to academic publications — Tor development raises many open questions and interesting problems in the field of anonymity systems.

Ideas List

This year, we have two ideas lists: one for projects to help develop Tor, and one for projects to help develop EFF's Switzerland tool.

Application Template

Please use the following template for your application, to make sure you provide enough information for us to evaluate you and your proposal.

What project would you like to work on? Use our ideas lists as 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, and convince us you have a plan for finishing it.
Point us to a code sample: something good and clean to demonstrate that you know what you're doing, ideally from an existing project.
Why do you want to work with The Tor Project / Switzerland 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 rather than just working on a project by yourself.
Will you be working full-time on the project for the summer, or will you have other commitments too (a second job, classes, etc)? If you won't be available full-time, please explain, and list timing if you know them for other major deadlines (e.g. exams). Having other activities isn't a deal-breaker, but we don't want to be surprised.
Will your project need more work and/or maintenance after the summer ends? What are the chances you will stick around and help out with that and other related projects?
What is your ideal approach to keeping everybody informed of your progress, problems, and questions over the course of the project? Said another way, how much of a "manager" will you need your mentor to be?
What school are you attending? What year are you, and what's your major/degree/focus? If you're part of a research group, which one?
Is there anything else we should know that will make us like your project more?

We have picked out twelve mentors for this year — most of the people on the core Tor development team and a few people from EFF's staff — so we should be able to accommodate a wide variety of projects, ranging from work on Tor itself to work on supporting or peripheral projects. We can figure out which mentor is appropriate while we're discussing the project you have in mind. We hope to assign a primary mentor to each student, along with one or two assistant mentors to help answer questions and help you integrate with the broader Tor community.

If you're interested, you can either contact the tor-assistants list with a brief summary of your proposal and we'll give you feedback, or just jump right in and post your ideas and goals to the or-talk mailing list. Make sure to be responsive during the application selection period; if we like your application but you never answer our mails asking for more information, that's not a good sign.

The more applications we get, the more likely Google is to give us good students. So if you haven't filled up your summer plans yet, please consider spending some time working with us to make Tor better!