On Fri, 26 May 2006, Justin Wikinator wrote:
Date: Fri, 26 May 2006 12:49:09 -0400 From: Justin Wikinator <touchmewithsynchronicpulses@...400...> To: Inkscape Devel List inkscape-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Inkscape-devel] No SoC support? Then get down to business !?
I'm unable to view the post to this invite-only group. Could you send the text to me ?
his message follows below, it is about Postgres but the advice is similar to the general comments made here previously:
All:
Here's part of an e-mail I just sent to our students whose proposals didn't get accepted. Interestingly, since this is our first year we originally went into SoC without any clear idea of what we were looking for, but very quickly developed common evaluation criteria.
Possibly Google wants to use it as part of the Student FAQ next year. We'll use it for ours.
-------- 1. If you are *already* a contributor to the project you are soliciting, your odds improve tremendously. (even seeking out key contributors online and befriending them in April can help)
2. Projects related to research already in progress at your school are the next best thing; it allows us to evaluate your approach, as well as giving us the assurance that you are serious about your topic and have already done background work.
3. Include a full plan of action with your proposal, about one half to a full page of what you're going to do and how you think you will do it, and possibly even what you will do if your initial approach does not work.
4. Include academic references, as links or *brief* quotes, which back up your ideas. That kind of stuff impresses us. On the other hand, do NOT include 15 pages of reference materials; we won't read it. Summarize.
5. If you know anyone in open source who can vouch for your code quality and/or diligence, use them as a reference.
6. Be Bold: suggest innovative and ambitious approaches to solve hard problems. Ultimately, we're looking for new major contributors for our projects and a bold proposal makes us think you might be a candidate. Yes, we offered up the TODO list as ideas, but stuff that we'd never thought of before got moderated up even if it didn't get accepted.
7. Be Realistic: SoC requires you to *complete* a project in 3 months or less. So don't be so bold that your proposal can't be finished. One proposal we rejected almost immediately said "As a whole, i think this idea is too large to be pulled off by one person in 3 months." We agreed.
8. Be Original: Many students submitted nearly-identical proposals based on recent "hot" papers on ACM and similar academic publications. For example, we got 3 separate proposals for an XML datatype using CTrees. If you do make a proposal based on a current "hot area" in CS/DBMS design, the make sure to make another unrelated proposal as well, because you'll have plenty of competitors.