[Rd] [SoC09-Info] Idea submission.

[Manuel J. A. Eugster]

Hi everybody,

as Fritz mentioned in his introducing "Google Summer of Code 2009"
email, I will manage the organizational part of the R-Project
application and (hopfully) participation.

Google's timeline schedules March 9-13 as date for organizations to
make an application as mentoring organization. The idea is now to
collect as many project ideas in a brainstorming phase and submit
these by March 10.

A project proposal consists of:
   (1) a short description,
   (2) a detailed description,
   (3) required skills and
   (4) the mentors name.

   I propose, that for each idea, a
   (5) short programming exercise is defined, which students have to
       solve before they can apply. Many other projects do this to
       reduce "noise". It also allows an evaluation and ranking if more
       than one student applies to the same project. But this is up to
       the mentor and hence is optional to include.

I thus encourage you to send such project proposals to me with a CC to
the r-devel list with [SoC09-Idea] as start of the subject line. I
will collect the ideas on a tentative list, see
http://www.r-project.org/soc09. The r-devel CC allows an active
discussion (as we already saw :-)). Just to clarify: in this
brainstorming phase, we collect ideas and there is no need to rank or
evaluate them!

I will monitor the different Google SoC information sources and mail
important informations with [SoC09-Info] as start of the subject line
to this list to keep you updated.


So, kick-off for idea proposals until March 10!

Best,
Manuel.