Re: GSoC applications and slots

[Urs Liska]

Am 07.03.2016 um 10:49 schrieb Urs Liska:
>
> Am 07.03.2016 um 09:58 schrieb David Kastrup:
>> Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:
>>
>>> Am 07.03.2016 um 09:26 schrieb David Kastrup:
>>>> Urs Liska <address@hidden> writes:
>>>>
>>>>> 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?
>>>> I rather think that we have to approach the GSoC coordinator(s) for the
>>>> GNU project.
>>> OK. Presumably we should do that when we have a pretty clear idea how
>>> many real applications we'll get, maybe at the start of the student
>>> application time window (March 13-25)?
>> I have no idea.
> I will write an email asking about that (now), together with the draft
> we made for the http://www.gnu.org/software/soc-projects/ideas-2016.html
> page.
>
> Urs
>
>

OK, I've got some information.

We can apply for as many slots as we want, as long as we can provide one
mentor per slot. The projects have to be declared "essential" or "desired".
GNU will collect all wishes and will apply with Google for the total
number of slots requested by the projects. Once they have the results
(i.e. the number of slots assigned to GNU) they'll try to serve first
all essential and then the desired projects.

They didn't tell me concretely when what will happen, but it seems clear
to me that we should figure out for how many slots we can provide mentors.
The student application window is March 14-25, so that seems to be the
latest possibility, but we should try to get to the point earlier.

Currently we seem to be lacking mentors!
If I can see correctly we might apply for three slots if we have three
mentors available, even if there's no match (yet) between mentors and
students. But of course it would be better to have mentors available for
those projects where we have students.

Urs