On 13-04-16 10:31 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

Pratik Sarkar writes:

...

I am working on the proposal.And how many slots are there for the filter project?

There are no slots for the filter project as such. The whole Mailman project has slots, and they are somewhat fluid, since we operate under the umbrella of the Python Software Foundation. For further details, like actual numbers, Terri Oda (PSF org admin) is authoritative.

Please be patient on this, as Terri is *very* busy right now. Also, you may not get hard numbers until the selection is actually made, since the PSF has to balance many projects.

Stephen's right -- we don't pre-set our slots. We're basically going to rank the applications we get in the order of "most want to mentor" to "least want to mentor" with some adjustments for the availability and interests of specific mentors so each mentor will get a project and student who suits them, then we'll accept the top X students. Probably we will not use more than one slot for any particular project this year, but that discussion will happen among mentors during selection.

How many slots will we have? Luckily for you, despite being busy, I've had to answer this question a few times already, so here's cut-and-paste from another email to one of the mentors who asked:

The short answer is "it depends on what Google will give us."

The PSF, in the past, has taken on around 35 students. But this year, we've grown by at least 50% in terms of projects. We may, by the time applications open, have as many as 19 sub-projects working under our umbrella. I'm hoping to request and receive at least enough slots for each project to get two students if they have the mentors to support this, so the rule of thumb for now can probably be that you'll all get slots for up to 2 students.

For the projects participating for the first time this year, probably 1-2 slots is the right number. But some of our projects are veteran GSoC participants who have significantly more than the minimum 3 required mentors. Those projects, hopefully, will be able to get more slots since I know they can and will successfully support more students. In previous years, Google's been great about letting us have all the slots we tell them we want and can support, but with the amount of growth we've had this year, I'm hesitant to make any promises.

Mailman is one of these veteran projects. I believe we currently have 6 mentors listed, but given my schedule for this year I'll be at most a co-mentor, and given his usually busy schedule Barry may do the same, so my guess is that at most, we'll be able to justify asking for 4 slots this year.

Terri