<div><span class="gmail_quote">On 4/14/08, <b class="gmail_sendername">Patrick Dubroy</b> <<a href="mailto:pdubroy@gmail.com">pdubroy@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="PADDING-LEFT: 1ex; MARGIN: 0px 0px 0px 0.8ex; BORDER-LEFT: #ccc 1px solid">How many SoC slots have been requested by OLPC? In the SoC web app,<br>the "likely to be accepted" line seems to be around 30 applications.<br>
However, a friend who is signed up to mentor for another organization<br>said that Leslie Hawthorn sent a message to one of the SoC lists<br>saying that OLPC has only asked for 4 slots. Is this true? If so, that<br>seems awfully low.</blockquote>
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<div>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. </div>
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<div>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 <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Category:GSoC_proposals">wiki category</a>, I can count at least 10 applications besides <a href="http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Bityi/GSoC">my own</a> 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).</div>
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<div>I would love to hear something more definite from SJ on the numbers.</div>
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<div>Jameson</div></div>