GSoC applications and slots

[Urs Liska]

Hi guys,

it seems there's the chance this year that we end up with more GSoC
applications than available slots. Right now there are four people
having expressed interest in it, and my impression so far is that the
majority (or even all) may go the way through to an application.

That raises the question: How does the allocation of slots with GNU and
Google is supposed to work? I'm sorry but I don't recall that from last
year (only that we "lost" students along the way, ending up with an
unused slot). Google says that slots are (partially?) assigned according
to the number of applications, but I have no idea what that concretely
means, especially as we are not the project itself but have GNU as a
"proxy".

So: do *we* have to approach GNU to apply for a number of slots? If so,
when should we do that and who would do that?

Urs