Google decided to extend the student registration period in order to allow more students to apply, since most organizations reported (on the private mentors mailing list and on the program's IRC channel) that the number of applications is generally smaller than previous years. At the same time, the quality of the proposals seems to have improved for most organizations.
How do things look for XWiki?
The deadline extension didn't quite help, as almost all of the proposals were sent before the original deadline. I was surprised by the increase both in quantity AND quality of the proposals. For the number of proposals received, I suspect several factors, like the direct "marketing" done at the Iaşi and Moratuwa Universities by former XWiki students, the increased interest in Web Development platforms and wikis, and the coolness of the proposed projects. For the quality, I think there are two tendencies: the increased popularity of the program among good students (raising the number of good applications), and the reduced number of "let's give it a try" students who are interested mainly in the money (decreasing the number of poor applications).
So, what is the current status of the applications? While we cannot predict which students will be selected, as the number of allocated slots is unknown, we are very pleased with what we have. Most of the proposed projects are covered by at least one (good) application. For some projects we have two very good students, so we'll have to redistribute them to other projects. A rough estimate is that about 20 students provided good and very good proposals, which is quite a lot, given that mentoring is hard and time consuming (at least if we want to do this right), and there are around 10 mentors. We proposed a few more projects, and we're bringing in a couple of mentors to deal with this situation. We have no ordering of the applications yet, as the GSoC interface does not allow ranking students at this time, and reading all the proposals while they are still being added or changed requires a lot of time, which busy developers can't usually spare. We have provided feedback on some of the applications, and we're also available on IRC for live feedback.
Last year we easily dropped the number of applications from 30 to 10, but this year we'll have a hard time to do the same, and we'll feel sorry for the high quality proposals we would have to leave out. I hope that Google will take into account the much larger number of good students applying for an XWiki project, and will give us more than the 7 slots we received last year.
Anyway, we're looking forward to another Summer of Code, which is a really great way to spend a summer, and probably the best way to get into real software development.
Sergiu, ex-GSoC student, GSoC mentor and XWiki committer.
P.S.: Sorry for the late post (the deadline extension was announced on monday), but I didn't have time for it until now.
