Re: OPW; Where does the 500$ for each GSoC goes?

["Andres G. Aragoneses" <knocte gmail com>]

On 16/09/14 17:48, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> On Tue, 2014-09-16 at 10:22 +0200, Christophe Fergeau wrote:
> > So it's better to only have 15 students working on important things,
> > rather than having these 15 students, plus 10 others working on less
> > important things?
>
> Nope! But maybe with a better selection process we could instead end up
> with 20 students working on important things, with 5 working on less
> important things, and hopefully 0 on projects that don't match GNOME's
> priorities at all.

Maybe in the years that Google doesn't give many slots, you're right, a 
better selection process would help. But for example, this year's 
summer, Google gave enough slots to cover all the students that had good 
ratings from the mentors. So in cases like this, if more "less 
important" things have been selected by the students, you cannot really 
do anything. We don't tell the students to cancel their proposal and 
make another proposal for a different module. The ratings are based both 
on the quality of the proposal and the quality of the background of the 
students (the likelihood that the student is going to do a good job).

So in this case, the only way for the overall numbers to have more 
people working on important modules than on non-important ones, would be 
to reject the proposals for the non-important modules, leaving the slots 
empty. And slots empty doesn't mean that they get reserved for next 
years or that the stipend comes to the Foundation or anything, so it 
doesn't make much sense to do this.


> > > Yes! Within reason; we don't want to push students to work on projects
> > > they're not interested in, but we also don't want to fund them to work
> > > on something that's largely tangential to our interests.
> >
> > Why not? If it's the preferred student project, if the maintainers of
> > the associated module is ok with the project, isn't it good to have
> > students learn about our platform in general (gtk+, ...) even though
> > they are not working on a core GNOME module? We try to find some kind of
> > balance between the various projects, we sometimes try to push students
> > to work on core projects rather than the alternatives, but sometimes
> > students are just not interested, or the core projects
> > maintainers/contributors cannot mentor any/more students.
>
> Well at the end of the day, the number of students we accept is going to
> be based on how many Google allows us to, but I'd rather such projects
> be prioritized lower than others.

Again, yes, good point, but only for years where the number of slots are 
low.