GSoC: How can I improve next year?

For those students who are disappointed with a rejection email, here are some common mistakes and strengths we noticed. Keep these in mind to strengthen your proposal next year.

Common Mistakes:

• Did not follow directions
• Did not subscribe to and use the mail lists, IRC channels, attend team meetings, etc.
• Did not submit a final, complete proposal
• Misunderstood the project's scope, or failed to include writing documentation and tests throughout the coding period
• Poor timeline: unrealistic, or lack of implementation or time detail
• Did not take mentors' proposal feedback into consideration, or submitted too late to get input
• Did not link to commits to the KDE codebase
• Had no engagement with the community
• Demonstrated no knowledge of the KDE community's needs

On the other hand, some students have active since many months, or even a year.

Accepted Students:

• Showed extra effort, thought, and time spent on making a great proposal
• Submitted a complete draft soon after applications opened. Some even asked for feedback before that
• Improved each draft iteration with mentor feedback
• Demonstrated areas of growth and collaboration, through linked commits
• Engaged on mail lists and chat
• Engaged with the community past the submission deadline
• Detailed timeline included time for code review, unit testing, and writing documentation throughout the coding period
• Included all features planned to improve and/or implement the project
• Marked clear deliverables
• Included all other commitments, and adjusted timeline based on absences

There is no need to wait around for GSoC deadlines to get started or continue in any open source organization, including KDE.

This year, KDE had great student engagement and a good level of commitment for all students so even if you followed all of these points, you may still have gotten a rejection email. We realize that this can be discouraging. However, we did our best to pick the students whom we think can fulfill the project's needs, and continue along in the future as KDE developers.

We really appreciate all the effort and thank you for applying to KDE. Our community covers the world, and we're here to help you get started in open source development at any time. In fact, if you are interested in being mentored and do not need funding, we'll be rolling out Season of KDE in a couple of months.

Google Summer of Code students are announced today

Google Summer of Code students are announced today! The KDE community is happy to welcome our new students, who will be coding for Cantor, Digikam, Frameworks, Gcompris, Kdevelop, Kopete, Krita, Kstars, Labplot, Marble, Minuet, Plasma, and Wikitolearn (alphabetical order, not in order of importance).

For Cantor, Rishabh Gupta will "Port all backends of Cantor to Q/K process." For Digikam, Yingjie Liu will make “Face Management Improvements," Ahmed Fathy will enable "Database export to remote network devices using DLNA/UPNP," Swati Lodha will create "Database separation for Similarity" and Shaza Ismail Kaoud will make a "Healing clone tool for dust spots removal."

In Frameworks, Chinmoy will enable "Polkit Support in KIO." Gcompris has two students working with the same project title, but will be doing different independent tasks. Divyam Madaan and Rudra Nil Basu will both be "Finishing started activities for GCompris in Qt-Quick." In Kdevelop, Emma Gospodinova will provide "Rust support for KDevelop" while Mikhail Ivchenko will give us "Go Language support in KDevelop."

Kopete has two students this year; Vijay Krishnavanshi will create a "Testing interface for Kopete and Improvement of protocol support" and Paulo Lieuthier will make "Chat history improvements." Krita has four students; Alexey Kapustin providing "Telemetry for getting statistics for which features are used the most in Krita," Grigory Tantsevov "A Procedural Watercolor Brush Engine for Krita," Eliakin Costa will "Develop a showcase of Krita's new scripting support" and Aniketh Girish "Integrate with share.krita.org."

In Kstars Csaba Kertesz (kecsap) will "Improve stability, testing and bring modern C++ to KStars." Labplot's Fábián Kristóf will begin "Adding support for plotting of real-time data in LabPlot." Marble: Mohammed Nafees (mnafees) will work on "Marble Indoor Maps" and Bartha Judit (Bernkastel) "Marble Material Maps." Minuet's Ștefan Toncu (StefanT) will create a "Multiple-Instrument View Framework." For Plasma, Lukas Hetzenecker will "Make High-DPI awesome" and Atul Sharma will be "Migrating to Kirigami (Koko)."

Finally, Wikitolearn has three students for 2017. Davide Riva will work on "Chat Bridge," Vasudha Mathur will "Stabilize and ship Ruqola" and Cristian Baldi will make a "Progressive Web App for WikiToLearn."

KDE Student Programs thanks all these students for their fine work so far, and the mentors and teams who are already helping these new KDE developers fix bugs and improve our codebase, documentation, testing, and quality. We're really looking forward to working with all of you as we prepare for the coding period, which begins May 30. Look out for the student blogs and posts on the Planet and mail lists, welcome them and help them as you are able, now during the "community bonding period."