In the middle of the Summer of Code proposals process and it’s been a mixed yet mostly good experience. We still have room for more proposals, so keep helping interested students and encourage them to get in a proposal for Fedora or JBoss.org. We’ll know at the beginning of next week if the student deadline is extended; currently 31 March still stands as the application deadline.
We’ve had a huge increase in the number of mentors. Where last year we were a little short handed to start, this year we have a very large pool, nearly eight times what I saw last year. Wow. My people are really showing themselves. I’m proud; I mean that.
We’ve had a slight increase in applications so far, maybe twice the number I recall from last year? These aren’t statistics, just a quick gut survey and recall. But definitely more students. We suppose there will continue to be new applications right up to the deadline. As I did in previous years, I am not going to review applications until the deadline. You can do as you wish. It is likely that we’ll divide up the proposals to have mentors focus on one or just a few applications.
If the student application deadline is extended, that would be good for Fedora and JBoss.org. We could use a bit more time to get the word out and attract more students. I suspect Fedora is a bit hard to categorize for students. It is downstream of many projects, yet there are many, many Fedora SIGs and other sub-projects that it’s hard to know where to start. JBoss.org is equally difficult in a different way. There are 42 projects currently on the JBoss.org projects page, and some dozen plus ideas on the SoC ideas page. It’s very focused as a project (application server and components), but it is a large project with hundreds of contributors creating a broad-range of components.
Thanks again, mentors, we’ll definitely have work for you in reviewing and helping to tune the proposals. Keep encouraging students to apply, especially if there is a week extension.