[Gsoc] bad news on the Zope Foundation slot count

[Aroldo Souza-Leite]

Hi all,

in my opinion, we should stick to the number 10, do our best in the ranking period to be proud of 10 applications, and make this point clear to Google. The reason for this is very simple: we were 100% successful last year, and this year the ZF mentor team is **able** to mentor 10 Gsoc projects. Just take a look at the length of our mentor list and their qualifications. We can afford to assign a mentor and a co-mentor to each of the 10 applications and guarantee that all projects will be successful except for forcemajeure. In comparison to most of the other mentoring organizations, to be in a position to say this is sheer luxury.

For your information, below are two excerpts from the disscussion with the GSoC management.


Regards,

Aroldo.

thread: Preliminary Slot Counts (long but important)

(http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-mentors-list/browse_thread/thread/849bc34f2cd26111?hl=en)

------<Leslie Hawthorn>----------------
Yes, past history is taken into account.  We'll be taking it into more 
account once we have a good idea of what projects can actually handle. 
Current scoring is based on overall popularity, so you may have gotten more 
and better apps, but less of the total pool.  Again, these preliminary 
numbers are preliminary only.  We will be making adjustments. 
-------</Leslie Hawthorn>----------------

----------<aroldo>--------------
Hi Leslie, 

for the Zope Foundation (ZF): 


we are fully prepared to mentor the 10 projects we asked for. All of 
ZF's last year's Gsoc 4 projects, the first time we participated in 
the Gsoc,  were very successful during the Summer and in follow-up 
events and projects. We are  much better organized this year.  Our 
strictly selected mentor team has been rigorous in not having weak 
applications, communicating intensely with students  before the 
application deadlline and supporting strong applications from the 
start. As a result, we had an absolutely clean list of 12 plausible 
student applications on April 7, of which we find 10 good, most of 
them very good - that is 10 applications for 18 mentors!. For each of 
the current 10 applications we want to mentor, we are now assigning a 
qualified mentor and a backup mentor, whereby a mentor coordinator is 
seeing to that the projects run on a professional basis. I hope this 
counts positively for the next round this week. 

-------------------</aroldo>--------------