[Gsoc] bad news on the Zope Foundation slot count

[Sidnei da Silva]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 02:30:39PM +0200, Martijn Faassen wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> Apparently we cheered too early on the amount of slots the Zope
> Foundation will have - the numbers of assigned slots (10) we saw in
> the application are *not* the actual numbers. The number is still in
> flux and we're doing our best to increase it, but if the current story
> stands, we'll have only *2* slots, half of what we have last year.

In the meantime, the mentoring organization administrator needs to fill that
desired slots field with a real number of expected students. Then after that
those numbers will be reviewed. There will be opportunity to explain our
situation to the program manager on IRC. The criteria is described here:

  http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-announce/web/notes-on-student-allocations

> To be honest, given this number I feel like I've been wasting my own
> time and everybody else's. Our vastly increased efforts have had no
> impact. My apologies students and mentors. Looking at the list of
> other projects and the few slots they are assigned, I think we
> shouldn't hope for too many slots more - perhaps back to the 4 we had
> last year.

I disagree, it wasn't a waste of time at all. The number of slots is not
final yet, and if we have great proposals (and we have better proposals than
the Plone Foundation this year, imo) we can explain our case and I'm sure
that the program managers will do their best to allocate a higher number of
slots for us.

> This WILL make the voting procedure far more interesting, to see which
> projects survive.

Indeed. I believe we need to shrink down the list to the 'absolutely must
have' projects, even if that list is a lot longer than our best dreams can
hope for the number of allocated slots. Then, we could for example get the
Zope Foundation itself to fund a few great proposals that didn't make the
cut line.

-- 
Sidnei da Silva                                   
Enfold Systems            http://enfoldsystems.com
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