Sugar Labs is the community organization behind the Sugar Learning Platform, a free and open-source software project. Sugar is the core component of a worldwide effort to provide every child with equal opportunity for a quality education. Originally developed for the One Laptop per Child XO-1 netbook and designed from the ground up especially for children, Sugar offers a hardware and distro independent alternative to traditional “office-desktop” software. Sugar Activities running on the Sugar Learning Platform promote collaborative learning and critical thinking, and are used every school day in 25 languages by almost 1,000,000 children in more than 40 countries.

Sugar Labs, a volunteer, non-profit organization, is a member project of the Software Freedom Conservancy. The mission of Sugar Labs is to support the Sugar community of users and developers and establish regional, autonomous “Sugar Labs” around the world to tailor Sugar to local languages and curricula. Sugar Labs volunteers are passionate about providing education to children.

All you should put here is a link to your application on our wiki, such as http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Summer_of_Code/Student_application_template . If you consider any of the following information private, you can include it here instead; otherwise, just erase the following.

About you

1. What is your name?
2. What is your email address?
3. What is your Sugar Labs wiki username?
4. What is your IRC nickname?
5. What is your primary language? (We have mentors who speak multiple languages and can match you with one of them if you'd prefer.)
6. Where are you located, and what hours do you tend to work? (We also try to match mentors by general time zone if possible.)
7. Have you participated in an open-source project before? If so, please send us URLs to your profile pages for those projects, or some other demonstration of the work that you have done in open-source. If not, why do you want to work on an open-source project this summer?

About your project

1. What is the name of your project?
2. Describe your project in 10-20 sentences. What are you making? Who are you making it for, and why do they need it? What technologies (programming languages, etc.) will you be using?
3. What is the timeline for development of your project? The Summer of Code work period is 7 weeks long, May 23 - August 10; tell us what you will be working on each week. (As the summer goes on, you and your mentor will adjust your schedule, but it's good to have a plan at the beginning so you have an idea of where you're headed.) Note that you should probably plan to have something "working and 90% done" by the midterm evaluation (July 6-13); the last steps always take longer than you think, and we will consider cancelling projects which are not mostly working by then.
4. Convince us, in 5-15 sentences, that you will be able to successfully complete your project in the timeline you have described. This is usually where people describe their past experiences, credentials, prior projects, schoolwork, and that sort of thing, but be creative. Link to prior work or other resources as relevant.

2. What is your t-shirt size? (Yes, we know Google asks for this already; humor us.)
3. Describe a great learning experience you had as a child.
4. Is there anything else we should have asked you or anything else that we should know that might make us like you or your project more?

Note: you will post this application on the wiki in the category Category:2009 GSoC applications. We encourage you to browse this category and comment on the talk page of other applications. Also, others' comments and your responses on the talk page of your own application are viewed favorably, and, while we don't like repetitive spam, we welcome honest questions and discussion of your project idea on the mailing list(s) (primarily sugar-devel for technical issues and It's An Education Project for educational issues) and/or IRC.

The NeL project has some good general recommendations for writing proposals. We endorse them all; although Sugar is (regrettably) not test driven development (yet - your project could change that!), we encourage GSoC code to include tests.