Google Summer of Code Update

If you’re still thinking about submitting an application for the openSUSE Project (or, actually, any project) for Google Summer of Code - the deadline is Friday, April 3rd at 19:00 UTC.

However, please don’t wait until the last minute! Leslie Hawthorn has sent out the following to the GSoC mentor’s list:

Right now, we have about 2x the students registered on the site as we do number of proposals submitted. No doubt some of these student registrations are "spam" from folks who won't be submitting proposals. However, I am also hearing things like "We have six applications submitted to the GSoC 2009 site but we're discussing another 20 or so in our forums." I realize that many organizations are working with students to refine their proposal ideas on their mailing lists, wikis, etc. However, a proposal on a wiki, mailing list, etc. does not constitute an actual application for the program; the proposal must be submitted to the GSoC 2009 site. While doing review and refinement outside of [//socghop.appspot.com](//socghop.appspot.com/) is a useful exercise, it doesn't allow us to accurately gauge the number of student proposals we're receiving for GSoC 2009. Please help us get an accurate sense of how many proposals will be submitted for GSoC 2009 by asking your students to submit their proposals to the GSoC 2009 site *now*. They are welcome to link to the wiki page, mailing list thread, forum topic, etc. where their proposals are under discussion and refinement as part of the proposal submission process.[[0](//socghop.appspot.com/document/show/program/google/gsoc2009/userguide#depth_studentapply)] In case folks are wondering, we want to get this data so we can decide if it's worthwhile to extend the student application deadline. We're pretty much set on "no, we won't be extending the deadline," but we need better data so we can assess if a deadline extension would be a good thing to do. We're still anticipating the usual "near to deadline application submission rush" that we see every year but we'd like to get a more accurate proposal count sooner rather than later.

Questions? Ask on the opensuse-project mailing list or in #opensuse-project or #opensuse-gsoc on IRC (Freenode). If you have general GSoC questions, you can also ask in #gsoc on Freenode, where many of the Google folks hang out and are extremely responsive.