Open Letter to KDE GSoC Students We Could Not Accept

Hello students,

I no longer have access to your proposal or emails, thus the open letter on my blog.

If you allowed commenting before the student proposal deadline, I along with other admins and mentors tried to help you improve your proposal. Some of you took the suggestions and sharpened your presentation, fleshed out your timeline and in general created a proposal you can be proud of.

If you did not allow commenting or only uploaded your proposal right before the deadline, you missed out on this mentoring opportunity, and for that I am sorry. That cut us off from a vital communication link with you.

This proposal process, along with fixing some bugs and creating some commits mean that you have real experience you can take with you into the future

. I hope you also learned how to use IRC/Matrix/Telegram channels to get information, and help others as well. Even if you do not continue your involvement with the KDE Community, we hope you will profit from these accomplishments, as we have.

We hope that your experiences with the KDE community up to now make you want to continue to work with us, and become part of the community. Many students whom we were not able to accept previously were successfully accepted later. Some of those students now are mentoring and/or part of the administration team, which is, in our eyes, the zenith of GSoC success.

Some of you we were unable to accept because we could not find suitable mentors. The GSoC team is asking us this year to have three mentors per student, because the world has become so uncertain in this pandemic time. So more developers who will mentor are a precious resource.

Almost every single proposal we got this year is work we want and need, or we wouldn't have published "Ideas" to trigger those proposals. If you are interested in doing this work and do not need the funding and deadlines that GSoC provides, we would welcome working with you outside of GSoC. In fact, each year we have Season of KDE which provides some mentoring, structure and timeline and no funding. This has been very successful for most mentees. And of course all are welcome to join our worldwide army of volunteers, who code, fix bugs, triage bug reports, write, analyze, plan, administer, create graphics, art, promo copy, events, videos, tutorials, documentation, translation, internationalization, and more! It is the KDE community who makes the software, keeps it up-to-date, plans and hosts events, and engages in events planned and hosted by others.

Please join the KDE-Community mail list and dig in! Hope to see you at KDE Akademy.

Oh hey, late update: I just learned today in #gsoc that I *do* have access to all the proposals -- and names and emails! So at the very least I will send a link to this open letter to all of our prospective students. Talk to you then. -v