FWIW, as I read the discussion about the same topic that happened on the GSoC lists, the common approach here seems to be:
[Quoting Leslie Hawthorn, who is the key contact at Google = official] Have the organization rank all other student proposals as though you had never submitted one. Have them evaluate how many proposals are of such high quality that they'd like to see them be funded. Wait for us to publish slot allocation numbers. If the number of proposals that they'd like to see funded is less than the number of slots allocated, drop out of the application process. It's therefore completely fair to everyone. E.g. Your organization has 6 very strong proposals and 4 good proposals. Your organization is allocated 6 slots. You drop out of the application process. or Your organization has 6 very strong proposals and 4 good proposals. Your organization is allocated 7 slots. Assuming your proposal is actually better than one of the 4 good proposals - and as a domain expert, I'd expect it to be - then yours could be the 7th project funded. I realize everyone is going to have differing opinions on how this should work. This is how I think you should go about it, should you choose to pursue applying as a student rather than mentoring. ---[... back to normal email ...]--- This boils down to giving PRIORITY to getting new, skilled contributors into the project, but still favors getting funding for an existing developers project from Google instead of either returning the slot to Google (*) or giving it to a proposal that we do not consider adequate. (*) Some people of course claim that this is unfair to other organizations students, that could have gotten the slot instead. On a side node, let me quote two FULL *successful* applications for NMAP according to the GSoC 2008 website (i.e. last year): --- Title: Feature Creeper / Bug Wrangler Abstract: I intend to complete small projects that don't take an entire summer to finish and to fix bugs that come up. One possibility is adding raw IPv6 scanning to Nmap. Title: Feature Creeper / Bug Wrangler Abstract: This application is for the miscellaneous bug fixer and small feature adding position. To implement such things as --tcp-ports and an OS fingerprint assistant. Due to the nature of this task, not to much can be set in stone for an Abstract. --- At least one of these 'students' had been in (with the same 'title') the previous year as well. So at least for me it seems that it is quite common to just use the funding of Google to get some WORK done, not necessarily to attract NEW people. We might just have too high standards ... Not that we should go all the way to NMap, I always found it very annoying to have to turn down some good applications because we didn't have any more slots, and seeing one-line applications get through at NMap... but I can definitely live with seeing a fellow DD *student* - that is still a requirement! - being funded for a worthy Debian project. Regards, Erich _______________________________________________ Soc-coordination mailing list [email protected] http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination
