Re: GSoC 2008 application summary

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

"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:
> 
> If you are a student who wasn't selected, you should be receiving
> a more detailed message from me in the next few days regarding
> your proposal.  I really want to let everyone know what happened
> with their proposal, including the general reasoning behind why
> the project wasn't selected.

These notes have now all been individually emailed to students.

As GSoC applications are considered private unless accepted into
the program I have specifically avoided CC'ing these messages to the
mailing list.  Every message obviously contained the student's email
address, but each also addressed specific parts of the student's
non-public project proposal.

The way we selected our 6 students was driven by a number of factors:

 - availability of mentors

   As org admin I was trying to balance one student per mentor,
   so that each individual mentor could focus their available time
   to a single student's benefit.  Most mentors were willing to
   mentor only 1 or 2 specific project ideas.  To maximize our
   accepted students we had to accept a diverse range of projects.

 - limited slots

   With only 6 slots available to us in the end we had to make
   some tough decisions about which projects should be selected,
   and which wouldn't.  It would be nice if there were more slots
   then students (and we could take them all), but that is not the
   way such things work.

 - community interest

   We tried to select projects that will have a visible impact on
   the overall Git user community.

 - proposal quality

   We looked for well defined proposals that had measurable criteria
   for success, and a clear direction for reaching that goal within
   the time allotted by the GSoC calendar.

 - community interaction and student enthusiasm

   We looked for applications where the student was active on our
   IRC channel, or discussed their project on the mailing list, or
   significantly via private email with a potential mentor.

   In all such cases the students showed enthusiasm for the project
   idea and a genuine interest in making Git even better for everone.
   This was not required, but it certainly made the mentors feel
   that the student was more likely to be successful this summer.

If anyone has any questions, or would like further information
about our selection process this year, please feel free to ask.


Oh, and last but not least, I _really_ want to thank our crew of
2008 mentors for helping with the evaluation process.  They spent
some pretty considerable time over the last few weeks talking to
prospective students on IRC, this mailing list, and private email,
as well as reviewing applications through the official GSoC web
application portal thingy (which as it turns out is a lot less
cool of a web application than it sounds).  Their efforts were very
much appreciated.

-- 
Shawn.