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



Hey,

On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 05:40:16PM +0200, Andres G. Aragoneses wrote:
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.

Something which would help to focus student proposals on 'important'
modules would be to have many more ideas for these modules on the idea
page https://wiki.gnome.org/Outreach/SummerOfCode/2014/Ideas as early as
possible. I'd say that at least half of the students make a proposal
based on an idea from this page. However, if we try to do that, I
suspect we'll quickly hit a limit on mentoring resources for said
projects. We generally don't recommend that a mentor has more than 2
students to take care of during summer.

Christophe

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