[OLPC-GSoC] Number of SoC projects requested by OLPC

[Jameson "Chema" Quinn]

On 4/14/08, Patrick Dubroy <pdubroy at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> How many SoC slots have been requested by OLPC? In the SoC web app,
> the "likely to be accepted" line seems to be around 30 applications.
> However, a friend who is signed up to mentor for another organization
> said that Leslie Hawthorn sent a message to one of the SoC lists
> saying that OLPC has only asked for 4 slots. Is this true? If so, that
> seems awfully low.



I am just another student. However, until SJ replies, I can fill in the
version of the rumor that I heard: Google has some magic AI which watches
the traffic through the GSoC interface and guesses how many slots each
organization is going to get. That AI is what came up with the number 4,
which OLPC agrees is too low. It seems probable that when a human at Google
reviews the situation, they will agree that the number is low.

Of course, "something more than 4" is still a pretty wide range, and all of
us students are dying to know about how many slots OLPC expects. Just going
through the wiki category<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:GSoC_proposals>,
I can count at least 10 applications besides my
own<http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bityi/GSoC>that appear to me to be very
well-thought-out and useful to OLPC; and I know
that there are 3 or 4 that are not on the wiki that SJ has mentioned in
lists of interesting projects. Based on that, I'd say it would be a real
pity if there were fewer than 8, and probably 13 would plenty, so if I were
voting the number should be somewhere in there. (speaking as a teacher, the
standouts are ANN, Coding Tutor, Customizing Moodle, DrGeo, Elements, Garden
Activity, and Water Wonders; there are others which might be great but the
wiki pages are not clear enough for me to tell, and several others which are
not oriented towards the classroom or have duplicate applications where I do
not comment).

I would love to hear something more definite from SJ on the numbers.

Jameson
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