Not Satisfied with Gsoc 2013 Result

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Anurag,

On Tue, 2013-05-28 at 09:50 +0530, Anurag Kanungo wrote:
> I have applied for Gsoc 2013 with a project of " Implementing an
> about:config functionality  " , but i am not selected .

	Wow, I'm really sorry you're disappointed ! so am I ! Every year we
have to make some really hard choices about which students to accept: in
an ideal world we would be able to accept and mentor everyone who
applies - however, we have limited mentoring bandwidth. My hope is that
your mail will encourage more people to sign to dedicate time as mentors
in future.

> I am not able to understand how he can be selected as if he hasn't
> worked , this sounds unconvincing to me .

	Let me try to expand a bit then: proposals are ranked not by a wizard
behind a curtain :-) but by most of the potential mentors giving each
proposal a score - which we sort by. Of course, I can't read the minds
of all the others ranking proposals, but here are some things I'd look
for:

	+ quality of proposal
	+ depth of education / open-source experience
	+ prior code contributions to other open-source projects
	+ history of patch submission:
		+ are the patches non-trivial ?
		+ did they start only when considering GSOC, or is this
		  a long-term contributor ?
		+ how much mentoring / help / interaction / hand-holding
		  was needed for each patch
	+ how excited I am about the topic / proposal itself
	+ whether I think the mentor / mentee combined can do a good job

	and things like that.

> Please look into the matter

	Ultimately, the decision is now made; and I'm convinced that, difficult
though it was, it was made with the best of intentions by the mentors at
large with all the available information (including the commit history)
taken into account. We really do work hard at this.

	Either way - again, I'm sorry you're upset by the result; and hope that
you'll consider submitting an application next time: one thing (that
perhaps is a problem here) is the issue of having two strong applicants
for a single proposal where we can only accept one. As such it can make
sense to submit proposals for a couple of tasks in your chosen project.

	Obviously we don't publicise the names of students that didn't get
accepted because that can be through no fault of their own (perhaps they
were super-stars but applied to a project with few mentors), and having
that permanently googleable and associated with their name might be
unhelpful to them. As such, I'd like to say that though we had nearly
fifty applicants we could only accept 13 and that you did very well in
that ranking.

	All the best,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot