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Hi all, First of all, thanks a bunch for having proposed a project for this year's GSoC in Debian. Our project idea list looks stronger than ever! Sorry for the long-winded mail but there's a lot of stuff to say about student applications :) Earlier tonight, I have cleaned up our project list[1], by moving the projects that had a mentor in the "SummerOfCode2014/Projects" namespace, and by hiding the "ProjectProposals" in the index. Mentors, if you haven't already, please register on google-melange, following the two steps described on the wiki[2]. That's the platform where you'll evaluate your students during the course of the program, so at least one mentor per project needs to be registered there. If all the mentors are there, we don't need to run after people to fill in evaluations and your admins are less grumpy. Go register already! The student application period opens at 1900 UTC tomorrow (March 10th), and closes at 1900 UTC on Friday March 21st. What that means is that a student needs to have submitted a formal proposal on google-melange.com in that time period. Students are free to refine their application until the time our student acceptances are sent to Google, that is until April 17. That leaves the students a good month to talk with you and come up with the perfect proposal. They just need to have submitted *something* to Google before March 21st. Of course, the earlier the better (melange can be a bit difficult under load)! The way we do student applications in Debian is that the students put their application on our wiki (instructions and list on [3]), and use google-melange only to link to that application. No need to copy-paste the whole page, just have them put a link. That way we keep everything in a central place that is easy to work with for us. Mentors, feel free to direct your students to the more relevant medium of communication for your project. You might want to use the soc-coordination list for inital contact as that's where students are usually directed (e.g. on our wiki page or on Debian's melange page). It might be a good idea to hang out on IRC too, as we have some students asking questions there. We can usually guide them or redirect them, but it's easier for everyone if you're there already. Mentors, timely interactions with students are a must, even if just to say "We're reviewing your stuff and we should be able to reply in a few days". Those kids are very enthusiastic, and it doesn't take much latency to demotivate them. For each proposed project idea, we will accept zero or one student (we also usually limit the number of students per mentor, but that shouldn't be an issue this year). We do things in a few steps: - At the beginning of April, we will ask for your gut feeling on whether an applicant will be a good match for your project. That helps us request a realistic number of student slots from Google. - Hopefully, we get all the slots we ask for (which has usually been the case). - Once student slot allocations are done by Google, we will ask the mentors for a ranking of the applications they received. That is, you're in the driver seat all the way and you get to decide who does your project. Google doesn't have a say, and the admins don't usually interfere. Suffice to say that ranking student applications is *HARD*, and the top-notch applications can get decided by a coin flip. If you have two strong contenders, tell us! There are several deduplication rounds (for students that applied to several orgs), and we have had top students apply to two orgs and get picked in both. If we know you have two strong profiles, it makes it easier on everyone. If there are irreconcilable differences between the orgs, we can always ask the student. :-) Mentors, to help you rank applications, we strongly advise you to propose your students a warmup task of some sort, to see how they can deal with your software and how they interact with you. For instance, have them fix a bug, write a patch, make or adopt a package related to your software stack, ... Thanks for reading thus far! Don't hesitate to follow up on the mailing list if you have any doubts or questions. And you can always contact us privately (sylvestre@d.o and olasd@d.o) if you have any issue you can't raise in public. Eager to receive those student applications! Cheers, Nicolas Dandrimont [0] Mentors and co-mentors don't really have a different status, so from now on we'll only talk about mentors, don't be surprised. [1] https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/Projects [2] https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014#I_want_to_mentor_a_project_in_Debian [3] https://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2014/StudentApplications
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