Getting back to the subject, can you assist with this statement? On 2016-08-30, 8:47 AM, "Niall Douglas" <ni...@boost.org on behalf of gsoc-ad...@boost.org> wrote:
On 29 Aug 2016 at 23:03, Jon Kalb wrote: > I would rewrite this to point out it's usually *their* code they > return to summer after summer. It takes that long, if not longer, to > get code into a Boost library. > > I´m not certain what is incorrect here. They are Boost projects correct? Many in the community would say not until their code enters the Boost distro. I would call them Boost-aspiring projects. The key thing I'm trying to communicate here is it is very rare that a student returns for a second or third year to work on code which they themselves did not write in a prior year. They continue their work on *their* code they themselves wrote previously. Most of them also worked on the same code during the academic year whenever time presented itself. There is a lot of personal investment here. It's why Google's policy changes don't fit well with us. > > This is incorrect. They have a policy of rejecting orgs from time to > time to ensure they don't become dependent on Google money. In > particular, they explicitly wish to dissuade orgs from bringing back the > same students again and again to work on the same code like we do. > > Whoa, whoa, whoa! > > This is new information for me. I was told that the reason that we were > rejected was because it was our "turn" and Google had previously > rejected other distinguished projects (linux??) and that it had nothing > to do with the nature of our application. You´ve just told me something > quite the opposite. That we were rejected because our pattern doesnTMt > match their criterion. I would very much have liked to have known this > last spring. You saw all the same emails I saw directly from them. That business of it being "our turn" is what they told us privately if you remember, but what that actually means and why is something else. My observation above is based on reading between the lines from the mentor's mailing list where there were a lot of unhappy campers about the new and unexpected lifetime participation cap rules (a student can no longer participate in GSoC more than three times, lifetime limit). That rule change severely affected some of the bigger orgs who had been training up students from 18 right through to the end of their postgrads, often seven or eight summers in a row. Google seems to feel that their funding is supposed to get students involved in open source, not subsidise the (cheap) writing of open source software. The latter they, according to their responses on that mailing list, is what they intend to stamp out. So I can't say for sure this is what they are thinking about us, but I also think some of it is unfamiliarity with what we do at Boost. We're not using students as cheap labour for writing large chunks of stuff designed by the mentor. Our students are a much higher calibre than at other projects, many of them are elite programmers awaiting a bit of the rough edges of inexperience to be rounded off. And getting code into Boost takes years, hell I've not achieved it yet myself, and neither have many on boost-dev. So expecting student GSoCs to be any different is not feasible. But trying to get Google's people to wrap their head around this is hard. We are one org of many dozens, and it'll take time to build the rapport we had with Carol. We'll keep repeating our story and see how it goes. > Have we tried to reach out to Carol´s replacement? Bradley probably > knows the players. We have repeated our particular use case whenever it came up. It is true we don't fit well into any of their categories, and that probably doesn't help either. Filling in the application form this year was much harder than before, I had to keep ticking "Other" rather than their predefined categories. Making the new admin have to think specially about us is always going to be a disadvantage at the beginning. Bradley I am sure can reach plenty of places I cannot. I'm on the wrong continent let alone coast. Niall --- Boost C++ Libraries Google Summer of Code 2016 admin https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/SoC2016 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Boost Steering Committee" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to boost-steering+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
