Prioritizing project ideas

[Andrew Su]

Several people have mentioned that they have the appropriate skills to be able to address a number of projects on our ideas page, and that it would be helpful for us to rank our projects by which ones are most exciting to us.

Truth be told, we love all the projects we put on the ideas page.  Selecting which project idea to pursue should primarily be determined by your skill set and by your interests.

If even after considering those criteria you want additional guidance on project ideas, we have identified a few projects ideas that may have slightly higher priority in our eyes (organized by project area):

BioGPS

• Idea 6. BioGPS: An enhanced HTML5 canvas-based data-chart viewer
  
• Idea 7. BioGPS:JQuery-based BioGPS gene-report layout canvas
  
• Idea 5. BioGPS: A web interface for webpage annotation
  
• Idea 8. BioGPS: MongoDB-based Gene-List storage and query API and an efficient enrichment-score computation engine
  

Gene Wiki

• Idea 12. Collaborative knowledge engineering with Twitter
• Idea 10. Über Wiki
• Idea 2. Gene Wiki+: User interface for identifying gene-disease links

Biological Games

• Idea 16. Biological games: Asymmetric version of Dizeez
  
• Idea 9. Biological Games: BioESP framework

Nevertheless, we can't emphasize enough that the primary criteria that we (and Google) will use for evaluating applicants is the match between the specific project idea and the applicant's skills, so please work on whatever project idea from our ideas page that most excites you the most.  Trust us, successful completion of any of these projects will have a high impact for biological research.

[Andrew Su]

Dear participants,

We are halfway through the application submission period.  Keep those applications coming!  (and the discussions here on the mailing list...)

The team of mentors has been discussing all the applications that have come in so far.  In doing so, we realize now that the Uberwiki project (idea #10) and the mobile interface for gene centric information (idea #14) both require more biological expertise than is probably typical among GSoC applicants.  We certainly still welcome applications on these ideas from those who think they have a good proposal to contribute, but overall it seems less likely at this point that one of those proposals will be ranked highly by our team.  Just want to pass along this feedback sooner rather than later...

Cheers,
-andrew