Organization Eligibility

[Rob Vesse]

Hi

While I know it hasn't been announced yet I'm thinking of applying as
an organization for GSoC 2011 and have a query regarding my projects
eligibility. I have a number of ideas for interesting student
projects of various difficulties which I either don't have time to
attempt myself or don't have the specific skills/knowledge to
undertake them.

My project has been going for approximately 2 years now but I am the
only registered committer with a small number of occasional
contributors who provide bug fixes/patches/plugins/suggestions which
are then implemented/committed by myself as required. Despite this my
user base continues to grow and I know and have contact with various
large organisations (both governmental and corporate) and other open
source projects that are using my project as part of their own work.

So essentially my question is whether it will be worth me applying or
whether my application is likely to get dismissed out of hand as the
project is too young/small?

Best Regards,
Rob Vesse

[Rohan Prabhu]

Hi,
I am student myself who participated in GSoC 2010. Hence I cannot
really give you an overview of the story from the organizations side,
but maybe could share a few things with you from the other end. Do
note that this is solely my opinion and is based on what I've seen and
hence, does not strictly adhere to GSoC policy.

1. The size of an organization is not as big a factor as the activity.
Even if you're the sole committer, but have shown good enough
activity, it will go a long way in you getting selected as an
organization.
2. If you're project is very new, it may or may not get selected. In
case it is very recent, it most probably wont. However, if you say
it's been 2 years then I think you have good chances.
3. The fact that it has very few developers might impede your chances.
One needs to see that for every project, google makes a huge
investment alongwith the students who enter GSoC. Students dont do it
for the money alone. It goes a long way in enhancing their careers.
Hence your project needs to show enough promise to attract students.
4. Don't expect to be a student magnet because even though your
project might be very exciting, there seems to be quite an amount of
fanboyism amongst students to work for organizations like KDE or
Apache.
5. GSoC is all about giving a chance to expand, for both the students
and the organizations themselves. Simply put, even Google knows that
bigger organizations are easily going to get coders as compared to
smaller projects. So they would love to give a chance to small and
upcoming projects as long as they see potential. Which is why I
believe you should definitely try.
6. Fill your application early so as to give reviewers enough time to
review your application. Make sure you submit your application in all
entirety as early as possible.

Having said that, I absolutely see no reason why you shouldn't apply.
If your project has potential and good enough activity and has shown
enough growth in the last 2 years, there is a very good chance that
you would get selected.

Regards,
rohan

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[Vinu Rajashekhar]

On Wed, Jan 5, 2011 at 5:23 PM, Rob Vesse <rve...@vdesign-studios.com> wrote:

Hi

So essentially my question is whether it will be worth me applying or
whether my application is likely to get dismissed out of hand as the
project is too young/small?

I don't think the problem would be that your project is too small or too young,

the problem is that you may not have enough people to mentor the students.

Since you are the sole contributor, who do you think will be mentoring the students

who would be participating in GSOC on behalf of your project ? How many students

will you be able to mentor alone ?

Well, this is my opinion alone and I am not making them on behalf of Google.

[Carol Smith]

Hi Rob,

I would encourage you to apply, as we are always looking for new organizations and new work in the opensource community. We accepted 26 new organizations in the GSoC 2010 program. 

However, I would give you a word of caution that we often hear from organizations that they didn't realize how much time and bandwidth it would take to mentor the student(s) for GSoC. If you've already considered this aspect and feel your org has the ability to do it anyway, please do apply when/if the program happens this year. :-)

Cheers,

Carol

[Rob Vesse]

Hi Carol

>
> However, I would give you a word of caution that we often hear from
> organizations that they didn't realize how much time and bandwidth it would
> take to mentor the student(s) for GSoC. If you've already considered this
> aspect and feel your org has the ability to do it anyway, please do apply
> when/if the program happens this year. :-)
>

Yes I am aware that the mentoring may require a fair bit of time - I
would expect that my organization would not be able to take on more
than 1/2 students depending on the projects that students wanted to
do. Some projects would potentially be mentored by me while others
for which I don't really have the expertise I would be looking to
arrange for contacts/colleagues/contributors with relevant expertise
to act as mentors.

Thanks for the information,

Rob

[Aaron S. Meurer]

I think Google only accepts an integer number of students :)

Aaron Meurer