- Alessandro Diaferia: Plasma Media Center Components
- Ana Cecilia Martins: New Widget Explorer
- Chani Armitage: containment-mouse interaction
- Diego Casella: PlasMate Editor - An editor for Plasmoids, DataEngines and Themes
- Rob Scheepmaker: Network transparency in Plasma
We received 48 proposals for Plasma work and that made the ranking decisions very, very hard on the Plasma mentors. We ranked based on thoroughness of the report, usefulness of the results, expectation of completion and how likely that work was to get done outside of a paid opportunity like SoC.
Even then we still had a dozen or so very high quality proposals which we had to then further cut back to just five. We tried to choose wisely, but we know that some proposals that were probably as deserving hit the cutting room floor. There was no winning when we had so many quality proposals.
Over the next couple days, we'll be in touch with the rest of the students just to let them know that we did indeed read and appreciate their proposal. If you are one of those people, please know that you can still work on your ideas and we'd be happy to help you do so.
For those whose projects did make it through, both for Plasma and all the other projects under the KDE umbrella: congrats and get ready to work hard and have fun; and if you are North America, start planning to attend the free (as in beer!) developer sprint for KDE SoC students!
4 comments:
Hey, aseigo! I'm ana cecília (or annie.c or simply aninha), the widgets explorer project girl! I'm here to thanks you all of the community for this opportunity - it feels great to be a part of it.
You can keep up with my project details at wouwlabs.com/blogs/anniec, where I've made my first post :)
And now it's time to work!
cheers!
Three regular plasma contributors out of five accepted students. I thought that GSOC was about getting new developers and giving the chance to the greatest number of different people to partecipate. I think that Chani (I might be wrong because I didn't check) will do her third GSOC in a row. I don't think it's fair for the people who got rejected. Anyway, I see how this can be useful to get a lot of working code in plasma so, I can understand your choice.
I totally agree with sickrandir. This seems more like abusing Google's patronage to give financial aid to regular contributors. Of course, the regular contributors probably will get things done more effectively and efficiently than newcomers. But you don't achieve valuable long term goals like gaining potential new developers if you only choose two newcomers out of five applicants.
Aaron, I'd like to know what your vision is on this issue?
first, it's very common for SoC participants to be previously involved; look around the various SoC projects and you'll see this all over.
in Plasma (the overall KDE situation is likely not exactly the same) we are making "first time" investments in two people and multi-year investments in 3. at least two of those three people came to us via SoC, and instead of simply investing in them once and then passing them over (risking losing them to other work over the summer) we're investing in them again.
investing only in first-year-never-contributed-before individuals isn't good for churn; investing only in existing contributors isn't good for new blood draw. so we balance it.
but newness wasn't the only thing we looked at; it was also how useful the results would be, how confident we felt the project would get completed and whether it was the sort of project that stood a better chance of getting done if it was paid for.
balancing value, success and investment in new and existing talent is not easy to do, esp since there's a fair amount of subjectivity in those numbers, but we feel that in that balance we are making great use of google's patronage and achieving the goals and spirit of SoC.
as for our ability to draw in new blood, you'll find plasma is one of the best projects out there for doing this year round. we know how to find, attract and then keep people. :)
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