Pre Announcement GSoC 2016 motivation text
@/all
Tomorrow is the big day of the announcement and it will be disclosed who becomes a Google Summer of Code student and how doesn't.
You all people gave us really awesome applications! In my whole time as GSoC administrator at GNOME I never saw so many so good applications! Really.
You heard right. Every single applicant had at least one commit accepted to coala. There was no SPAM proposal, there was not even a serious proposal of somebody who didn't get in touch with us, everyone of you solved an actual issue. I would have never dreamt of this.
Again you people did an awesome job. We were able to guide a lot of you people a bit where needed and you enabled us to help you a lot. While other organizations had one or two proposals in the beginning and a lot coming right before the deadline it was the other way round for us. You enabled us to do better planning and make your applications even greater!
You might have seen that we don't have a lot of mentors compared to the students we have. We were able to get 8 primary mentors just for coala as well as 3 secondary mentors. You can find their names here.
I would like to explicitly thank @justuswilhelm, @manoranjanp and @harshdattani for joining us on such a short notice so we can mentor even more awesome projects.
@fneu @Udayan12167 and @Makman2 are regular core contributors and too often I take their help for granted :) thanks to them for mentoring and keeping this project running.
@Uran198 did a very special thing: when we knew that we had not enough mentors we reached out to a few applicants and asked them if they would be interested to mentor. @Uran198 accepted this challenge and thus declined his chance to get the scholarship as no mentor can be a student. Every accepted student owes him a really high quality bar of chocolate as of now!
All of our mentors are very engaged. From what I know we were always the first to have decisions ready and on time making it easy for the PSF administrators to give us what we needed. You students and all mentors made this possible by being available!
Let's not lie: we had to make hard decisions. There will be rejections. The bar is very high. I never thought the bar would be this high but you all people set it that way by being so awesome. GSoC works like a market, there's a limited offer and certain demand. In our case the demand was high.
We were able to accept about 30% of our applications.
Many organizations have lower quality of applications and a higher acceptance rate.
If you are not accepted, it doesn't mean you're not doing a good job! It doesn't mean you don't have a chance next time or at other orgs - not at all! Please apply again! You now us and our community, if you are a GSoC student or not - you will receive our love and help!
Tomorrow evening you will get an email indicating if you're part of GSoC this year or not.
Talk to your mentor! We expect you to be available on this channel so we can lead you to the next steps. There will be lots of things to do in the upcoming weeks and months :)
- if you can't afford contributing anymore we're sad to see you go
- if you still want to help us, we're happy to help you reach your goals and get better at what you do! Just ping us. If you feel you could do better with some personal mentoring, we can make that possible as well.
coala