GNU Radio is an open source software radio project used extensively in industry, academia, and government for research, development, rapid prototyping, and deployment of wireless services. As an open source project, it has a wide-spread and disparate community of developers and users. Bringing members of this community together for a yearly conference helps to build a strong cohesion of ideas and identify and define the goals of the project. This conference also addresses the issues of increasing the development community of the project by getting to know potential developers and educating them on structure, style, and etiquette of a large, world-wide project used by thousands of people.
Overview The NSF support for the GNU Radio Conference, GRCon, provided students with funding to support travel to and from the event. The NSF support provided up to $10,000 to pay for student travel expenses incurred when attending the conference. The program started by providing student support for the GRCon12 (www.trondeau.com/grcon12), held in Atlanta, GA Sept. 24 – 27,2012 1 . The funding was extended to support GRCon13 (www.trondeau.com/grcon13), which was held in Boston, MA October 1 – 4, 2013 2. The following final project report quickly reviews the support provided for the two conferences and provides a few lessons-learned. Conference Support Review The student travel support for both years ended up supporting a small number of students:two for GRcon12 and three for GRCon13. Students that were supported came and participated in the conference as expected, many of them presenting their work as part of the conference program. Students are a big part of the GNU Radio community and the GRCons, and many have directly benefited from their time with GNU Radio and its community by getting into graduate programs, post-doc positions, and jobs in industry. We were very pleased to be able to support some of these students financially in order to ensure their greater participation with the community. Information about the students and each of the two supported conferences can be found in the previous annual summaries. We had hoped to support many more students than we did, and I wanted to explore a few potential reasons why. Some of this has already been mentioned in the GRCon13 annual report. First, I believe that in the first year of this program, we required a far too rigorous application program. We asked each student that applied to provide a detailed description application program. We asked each student that applied to provide a detailed description of their project for us to sort through and rank. The hope was that we would have more students applying than funds to distribute. In the end, we received only a few applications, many of which we disqualified immediately for failing some of the funding requirements, mostly involving students not based at a US institution. Those US-based individuals were all accepted based on their proposal. We were concerned that the lack of submissions was partly due to poor advertising of the program but also partly due to the excessive requirements of the application process. For GRCon13, we tried to promote the program more often and in more places. We also reduced the application requirement to a short abstract of the student's work with GNU Radio in their studies. We still only received a very small number of applications. In trying to understand the lack of interest in applying for travel funding, there seemed to be two main motivating factors. First, many students came from institutions that had strong research programs that would support their travel. On top of this, the fact that the funding was only for travel and not for food and lodging during the conference week made most students feel like the amount of work to both apply for acceptance and then apply for reimbursement was not worth the funding that their institutions would support, anyways. The students that were most interested in taking advantage of this program were based in international institutions and unable to take advantage of this opportunity. While we are pleased that we had the opportunity to support more students this way, the program was not as successful as we had hoped. However, the conference is growing rapidly, and GRCon14 (www.trondeau.com/grcon14) sold out with a fairly long waiting list even though we increased the room size by fifty percent over last year. With one hundred and fifty people attending the conference this year, we are actually larger than many other conferences in the wireless area. As the conference continues to expand in attendance and scope, and as we grow the organizing structure around it, we would be very interested to see about other opportunities to best support and serve students, including special STEM outreach events.
