Hi all, It's great to see that this year there are a lot of students interested in doing a GSoC project with Numpy or Scipy. So far five proposals have been submitted, and it looks like several more are being prepared now. I'd like to give you a bit of advice as well as an idea of what's going to happen in the few weeks. The deadline for submitting applications is 27 March. Don't wait until the last day to submit your proposal! It has happened before that Melange was overloaded and unavailable - the Google program admins will not accept that as an excuse and allow you to submit later. So as soon as your proposal is in good shape, put it in. You can still continue revising it.
From 28 March until 13 April we will continue to interact with you, as we request slots from the PSF and rank the proposals. We don't know how many slots we will get this year, but to give you an impression: for the last two years we got 2 slots. Hopefully we can get more this year, but that's far from certain.
Our ranking will be based on a combination of factors: the interaction you've had with potential mentors and the community until now (and continue to have), the quality of your submitted PRs, quality and projected impact of your proposal, your enthusiasm, match with potential mentors, etc. We will also organize a video call (Skype / Google Hangout / ...) with each of you during the first half of April to be able to exchange ideas with a higher communication bandwidth medium than email. Finally a note on mentoring: we will be able to mentor all proposals submitted or suggested until now. Due to the large interest and technical nature of a few topics it has in some cases taken a bit long to provide feedback on draft proposals, however there are no showstoppers in this regard. Please continue improving your proposals and working with your potential mentors. Cheers, Ralf