Hello all,
Prompted by the number of questions I am seeing on the list,
I'm writing some general information about the submissions.
The GSoC programme is extremely competitive,
and this competition takes place in two phases.
At first, each student competes in order to get
a project assignment. In this phase you are evaluated
against every other student (from all over the world!)
who also wants to participate and do this specific task.
Each task gets assigned to only one student.
There is a possiblity of multiple students working
on the same project, but they will be working
on different tasks (if the project has several tasks defined).
Once you are the best and you have been selected,
another competition takes place, amongst all the selected
students and projects, since Google cannot support (or fund)
an infinite number of them. In this phase, your proposal,
accepted by a mentor, is being evaluated by Google against
all other proposals accepted by all the mentors (in the world!).
Fortunately, Google accepts a number of proposals, not only one --
but the competition is tough!
Of the projects that GFOSS has published, two (at least) are special:
both CLIO and FilesDB are "new" implementations,
which means that whoever will be working on them
will not be modifying existing code, but writing it from scratch.
The size of these two projects is small enough
to guarantee easy completion by a single student.
Therefore there will be only one person (at most) working
on each of these, and they will be expected to complete them.
Having said all this, you must realize by now
how your application should be structured,
in order to maximize your chances for success.
Put yourselves in the place of a mentor and think about
how you would pick a single student for a task.
Let's say you have two applicants:
- Student A sends a generic "I am a student, I know programming,
I want to do project X, I think I will manage it."
- Student B sends "here's a github repository where you can see
the code I have written in the past; I sat down and thought
about the problem of project X, here's a detailed breakdown
of what I think is needed, with milestones and list of deliverables;
oh, and I also sat down and created a quick-n-dirty prototype
(because, frankly, with the tools available nowadays,
this took less than a couple of hours) to show you a first rough idea."
Given these two applications, which one do you think a mentor
will prefer? Keep in mind that the desired final outcome is to have
the system implemented by the end of the 3 summer months -- all the tasks
of GSoC are real-world needs that people have, not academic exercises.
Therefore, please think hard about how to make your application
stand out and make it easy for a mentor to choose you over all others.
The GSoC is *not* an appropriate programme for learning programming
or a specific technology. Students are mostly expected
to be productive during the whole 3 months. This does not imply
that you must be an expert when you submit the proposal.
However, it is a reasonable expectation that you will prepare
(by learning, etc.) before the implementation begins.
On the other hand, GSoC *is* a great opportunity to learn
about Open Source development. Besides programming (which
you will obviously do), you *will* be handling bug reports,
merging pull requests, answering questions, etc.
Your code *will* be reviewed and expected to be of high quality
before being accepted.
And all your interaction with the Open Source community
will have to adhere to the standards of this community.
Note that, in the case of the "new" projects (CLIO and FilesDB),
there is obviously not yet an established community.
However, there are few people who are interested in the end result,
and they will serve as the initial seed for a community.
I apologize for the length of this text,
but I believe it contains important info.
Hope it will help everyone with their submissions.
--
-- zvr --
-- +---------------------------+ Alexios Zavras (-zvr-)
| H eytyxia den exei enoxes | zvr [ at ] zvr [ dot ] gr
+-----------------------zvr-+
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