Folks, I perceive a low interest of our projects in GSoC. The list of projects that submitted project ideas that I compiled for Sally contained 33 entries of which some are subprojects I believe. With 138 PMCs plus 35 podlings, this is less than one fifth of our projects.
We only had 34 ideas one week before our application was due. I run into committers that are not members of their projects PMCs who are eager to be mentors but have no clue about what's going on because nobody from the PMC forwarded my emails to their dev lists. So the problem seems twofold: no interest and not reaching the right people. The latter could be improved by simply sending to committers@ instead of pmcs@ but it's the first that worries me. I believe GSoC and every other opportunity to attract new contributors to our projects should be a key priority of our PMCs. Apparently it's not, for whatever reasons. I could think of missing cycles, indifference, and wrong priorities. So what could we do to increase awareness for the opportunities GSoC offers and that this program is important to the foundation? Write more emails? Ask the board to mandate a section in board reports detailing the project's GSoC endeavors? Any ideas? Uli
