Hi all!

Today was the final day for the Google Summer of Code proposal rankings. As you can imagine, a number of us inkscaper's have been in deep, intensive discussions and votes to arrive at the final prioritization. The final decision of which 4 to select was extremely difficult, and really came down to the wire.

A large part of the controversy was whether to have both of the SVG filter projects in the top 4, or to go with 4 distinct projects.

But just then, in an amazing stroke of luck, Google was kind enough to allocate an additional project to Inkscape, increasing us to 5 slots! :-)

Thus, our final project selection is as follows:

Application Student Mentor ---------------------------------------------------------------------- SVG Filter Effects #1 Niko Kiirala Bulia Inkboard Protocol Spec / Lib Conversion Dale Harvey David Yip PDF Export with Cairo Mikos Erdelyi Ted Gould Memory Optimization Marina Diezler MenTaLguY SVG Filter Effects #2 Hugo Rodrigues Bulia

As I understand it, one of the SVG filter projects will be focused on the internal handling of filters at the SPObject level, the other will be focused on the rendering of the filters.

Thank you to everyone who applied this year. There were a number of excellent projects, and arriving at the final selection was extremely tough. Many of the proposed ideas were extremely cool and we would love to see them developed, and would love to be able to welcome the applicants to be part of the Inkscape community.

Many criteria went into our final decision, more than can be easily related. However, one of the driving considerations was for work we felt would maximize the benefit to Inkscape users. We know from user feedback that these projects, if completed successfully, will have a transformational effect on Inkscape as an application - by the end of this summer, Inkscape will likely be a light-year ahead of where it is today.

Bryce