Summer of Code/Application review notes

Thank you to everyone who applied for GSoC this year. Here are some comments:

• Please try to watch your application's talk page, as well as the comments in google's web app, and respond as quickly as possible. If language is a barrier, it is better to respond in Spanish than not at all, although English is preferred.

Don't reinvent the wheel

When working in open source, the idea is to get as much done with as little work as possible. That means you need the ability to find, evaluate, and adapt existing code to your purposes. Some (not all) of your applications do not give adequate attention to this issue. If we send you a link to this subsection, please respond by:

• Searching (in places like sourceforge and google code) for existing tools which do something similar to what you propose

• Evaluating their usefulness, including the health of the code, the approximate size of dependencies they would add to Sugar, and their adaptability for your purpose.

• Figuring out, as specifically as possible in the time you have, how they'd fit into sugar, and where you'd have to change the tool or sugar itself to make that happen.

Tell us something about what you find in each step. Even "I found project xxx but it's defunct, and yyy but it doesn't fit at all because zzz" is useful to us to see that you can do this work.

Competing proposals

Your proposal is one of two or more proposals to attack the same problem. In order to decide, we will be looking at the following, in more or less this order:

• Clarity, specificity, and attainability of the deliverables mentioned in your timeline.

• Any useful patches you submit to Sugar or one of our upstream projects. Please link such patches in comments on your application.

• Your community involvement during this period. This includes responsiveness to any comments on your application or on your proposal's talk page; your own helpful comments on other application's talk pages; and any other community tasks such as bug triage or wiki cleanup. Feel free to call attention to any of this in your application, but don't let it get in the way of the above two points.

• Your own qualifications, as far as we can evaluate from your application.

Note also that we will consider accepting two good applications in the same general problem space if we consider them to be distinct enough.

Please act accordingly.