GNOME Summer Of Code 2007: ranking.

General

As the April 9th deadline approaches, I am becoming more brutal with my ranking of the summer of code applications. The Google web application is still not a big help with managing them, but Lucas Rocha and Vincent Untz are doing the hard work to keep us organized.

We have approximately the same number of applications as last year, but there are some signifcant differences:

  • Last year (and before) a very large number of applications were complete crap, either being copy-pastes of our own project proposals, or one-line applications. This year we seem to have very few of these.
  • We have more than zero female candidates, though still not an acceptable amount. But it’s hard to guess at the gender of some of the names.

I think these changes are down to our poster drive this year, and the summer of code process being more familiar to people now. It means that we have a lot more text to read, and many more difficult decisions to make.

Hopefully it will allow us to choose some more genuinely useful projects than we have sometimes in the past. I’d like our students to learn to consider user goals and usability, and I’d like them to become involved with the community by writing code that others actually care about.

2 thoughts on “GNOME Summer Of Code 2007: ranking.”

  1. I signed up last year in the hope that I could provide some usabilty advice and help students avoid a few pitfalls and at least help them through the most important parts of the Human Interface Guidelines and maybe Accessibilty and Style guides too.

    In the end I wasn’t able to offer much in the way of help and it seems to me mentors must push studnets to use the normal channels of communication and get on the mailing list and on IRC and try to use the best practices from GNOME. Students are probably too used to working on their own. No need to show how brilliantly independant you are, the whole point of Summer of Code is to get help as much as possible (just give credit where credit is due) and to collaborate and become a normal part of the community.

    Glad to hear the projects are of a higher standard this year. Hope to see students asking questions on the usability list soon enough.

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