Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Getting rejected as GSoC organization
Last week I submitted an application on behalf of the Maliit project to participate in this year’s Google Summer of Code, as a mentoring organization. Today I got the rejection mail in my inbox.
Maybe I am too European to understand this, but what I find disappointing is the lack of any reason given in that e-mail, other than that too many applications were received. I mean, how am I supposed to learn from that? How will I know whether a project like Maliit has any chance at all, or whether I should even try to submit a project next year? Even for the list of accepted organizations, such as KDE or GNOME (of which both are pretty much doing the same stuff, so why do we need both here?) no reasons are given of why they were accepted.
Having had a bad experience with opaque decision making in the MeeGo project, this tastes just as bad. Sure, not giving reasons so that you don’t have to argue about them later on has apparently become a standard procedure, but I am not willing to accept such behaviour. After all, I also spend time in writing the proposal, and I find it disrespectful to only receive an empty, canned response.
If you are on the other side of a similar process, be it for a conference or because you work in the HR department of a company, please do think about whether it’s really too much to ask for the extra five minutes it takes to provide the reasoning behind your decision, and whether you would like to be treated the same way as you treat others.
Google can certainly do less evil than that.
PS: This blog post about the rejected WordPress project mentions a follow-up meeting, but I was unable to find any concrete information on the GSoC website.
PPS: On the list of accepted organizations, you’ll find entries such as “Name: Pidgin, Finch, and libpurple. Tags: pidgin, finch, libpurple, instant messaging, im, networking, gtk, glib, c, amazing, awesome, a+++++ would do business with again, space mice, team edward” (emphasis mine) – is that supposed to be taken seriously? Or shall I conclude that the submissions are not thoroughly reviewed?
Update: There are some who try hard to misread what I wrote. I think I should clarify what a successful application as a GSoC organization means.
You will:
- spend a lot of time mentoring students during your typical holiday and travel season;
not get paid for that(the students will); (update: mentors get 500USD, thanks to lucianafujii for pointing that out)- receive a GSoC T-Shirt;
- be invited to the Googleplex later the year (you will usually have to take extra holiday for that though, so there goes more of your spare time, if you accept the invite);
- increase the visibility of your project.
Heavily simplified, GSoC consists of one entity providing the money, another entity providing time and a third entity consuming both. There’s also a big deal of knowledge transfer happening between the entities, but the flow is less clear than for time and money.
However, my point is: I would have been part of the time spending entity and without that entity, GSoC simply does not happen. So think again before you essentially reduce me to a loudly complaining free-rider who should STFU and get over himself.
