GSoC '07 - Accepted!

Google accepted our application to GSoC '07. Thanks to everyone who helped with reviewing the application, and most of of all thanks to our volunteer mentors!

Small catch though: I didn't find this clause earlier when I setup the application, but reading through the Terms of Service for the program I found this:

  10. All necessary tax forms or other tax related documentation
  required to provide payment to the organization

Yea... we as an organization get $500.00 USD for each student that particpiates:

  http://code.google.com/soc/tos.html

Small fun fact that I did not previously realize. Apparently there might be some complications from being a GSoC project, as we don't legally exist as an organization in any locality. And there's of course the question about what to do with the money we receive.

I figure we'll probably get 1, maybe 2 slots, which means about $500-$1000 USD.

"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:

Also, the organization setup page is asking us "desired number of projects".

Hmm. Gee. We have an entire ideas page full of projects that we'd desire to have done. More than we can realistically mentor students working through (depending on the skill level of the individual of course).

I'm thinking we ask for 2 or 3 slots, given that we have 6 mentors lined up right now.

Thoughts?

On Thu, 15 Mar 2007, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

I _think_ you can either:

 - decide to pay the mentor (and have the mentor just pay the tax on it 
   as extra income). Mentors can then sort it out amongst themselves.

 - If nobody really wants to go through the hassle (not so much in 
   receiving the money, as trying to sort it out ;), decide to just 
   directly transfer it to some charitable organization that is already 
   set up (eg the EFF).

as it would probably be more pain than it's worth to actually try to set up some "git foundation".

Regardless, congrats on the GSoC entry!

		Linus

On Thu, Mar 15, 2007 at 09:43:46AM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

Right, but we also have the option to look at organisations dedicated to handle this very problem, like Software in the Public Interest (http://www.spi-inc.org/ - I'm sure there are others). For the record, SPI was initially created to handle the Debian assets, and now does the same for other projects (notably, according to their website: freedesktop, postgresql, oftc).

"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:

So I've been doing some more research on the GSoC process, based on what other organizations have written about their own experiences last year. One thing that came up frequently was many organizations found having a student application template useful, as it helped the student and the mentors to better focus their proposal and their review.

This may be important to us, as there were 6,338 applications last year:

  http://code.google.com/soc/GSoC2006Statistics.pdf

Boost for example received some 160 or so applications (see page 3). We aren't as big or as popular as Boost is, so I don't expect to receive that many, but I would also like to hope that we will get more than 10 applications. ;-)

One of the better (in my opinion anyway) templates appears to be the NetBSD one:

  http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/soc-application.xml

We have not yet defined a template for student applications, but I'm thinking we may want to at least draft one up and offer it as an option for students to follow.

Interesting side note: The largest compliant from the '06 Apache Software Foundation mentors was that the students were not given committer access to Subversion. They felt this made it difficult for the students to contribute. Now if only there was a really cool distributed version control system... ;-)

"Shawn O. Pearce" <spearce@spearce.org> wrote:

...

Besides giving the lesson that I cannot spell (or type), I've put together a possible set of points that I think would help students to write better proposals, and will help us as mentors to review them:

  http://git.or.cz/gitwiki/SoC2007Template

Hi,

On Fri, 16 Mar 2007, Shawn O. Pearce wrote:

Looks good to me!

Ciao, Dscho

On Mar 16, 2007, at 8:18 AM, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

Ditto. ~~ Brian