Re: GSoC '07 - Accepted!

["Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org>]

"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:
> Google accepted our application to GSoC '07.  Thanks to everyone
> who helped with reviewing the application, and most of of all thanks
> to our volunteer mentors!

So I've been doing some more research on the GSoC process, based on
what other organizations have written about their own experiences
last year.  One thing that came up frequently was many organizations
found having a student application template useful, as it helped
the student and the mentors to better focus their proposal and
their review.

This may be important to us, as there were 6,338 applications
last year:

  http://code.google.com/soc/GSoC2006Statistics.pdf

Boost for example received some 160 or so applications (see page 3).
We aren't as big or as popular as Boost is, so I don't expect to
receive that many, but I would also like to hope that we will get
more than 10 applications.  ;-)

One of the better (in my opinion anyway) templates appears to
be the NetBSD one:

  http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/soc-application.xml

We have not yet defined a template for student applications, but
I'm thinking we may want to at least draft one up and offer it as
an option for students to follow.


Interesting side note: The largest compliant from the '06 Apache
Software Foundation mentors was that the students were not given
committer access to Subversion.  They felt this made it difficult
for the students to contribute.  Now if only there was a really
cool distributed version control system...  ;-)

-- 
Shawn.