[maemo-developers] SoC update

[From: Quim Gil]

Hi,

Things are going not-bad in the Summer of Code project. We currently
have 7 project proposals, 8 community mentors, 8 backup mentors (Nokia
employees) and 1 administrator (myself, Nokia employee too). You can see
titles and names at http://maemo.org/maemowiki/GoogleSoC2007

PROJECT PROPOSALS
The deadline for student proposals is in 4 days (March 26; applications
must be received by 5:00 PM Pacific time (12:00 AM UTC March 27, 2007).
I haven't looked in depth to the proposals yet and I still haven't got
an opinion about their quality and feasibility. We don't know either if
there are more proposals being worked on, hopefully yes. In general I
think it would be good to have more proposals to choose from and rank.

COMMUNITY MENTORS
I have been approving all the candidates that went through the Google
form. No reliability checked. Mentor reliability depends a lot on the
quality/feasibility of the project a mentor is tied, so it is a bit of
chicken and egg game to see which projects+mentors need to be promoted
at the top of the list. Currently 3 mentors have requested ownership of
1 of the 7 projects proposed. We will have 10 days or so to discuss all
this internally, between all mentors.

BACKUP MENTORS
We will follow the plan, and these backup mentors working at Nokia won't
take ownership of any project. They are there now in order to help
studying proposals, provide background info etc. They will be there to
help in the case a project has problems delivering. Let's leave just a
2cm open door to a possibility of an ideal project proposal having their
ideal mentor counterpart in a backup mentor, and everybody agrees that
it would be stupid not to take this opportunity. Hopefully we don't need
to use these 2cm, though.

ORGANIZATION ADMINS
Currently we have just one: myself. I volunteered to bootstrap this
process in order to get a SoC opportunity for maemo and the mission is
accomplished now. We need one or more community administrators and I
would stay as backup admin, just in case help is needed. A first rule of
this game was that maemo @ SoC is a community driven initiative. The
idea was brought by community people, and the best way to keep this aim
is having community people in the key positions. Conclusion: we need 2
administrators, can you please decide which ones?

SoC CASH
There are still no candidates to get the cash paid by Google to the
organizations taking part in the SoC. Just think of a cool project/group
around maemo needing some cash to do great things and we will redirect
the Google money there. Maemo hasn't got an entity by its own, as for
today is a Nokia owned brand. Another fundamental rule of the game was
Nokia or Nokia employees won't receive a cent from this program. Propose
alternatives, Google doesn't need to save that money.  ;)

-- 
Quim Gil - http://maemo.org