Maybe no one cares, but still here are some random thoughts about what happened so far for us. I write them now, because I might forget those when all will be over.
Introduction
This is the second year for VideoLAN as a mentoring organisation for the GSoC.
In our first year we didn’t outperform for many reasons (see here for details
VideoLAN is not a very stuctured organisation.
Candidacies
But this year, we received 85 candidacies (+8 ineligible) against something between 40 and 50 last year… (I fear that I don’t have the exact number ;-) )
I know the GSoC is getting bigger every year, but still this is a big increase for us. Moreover, some of the students did some really good patches (one almost solved the main subject of one of our idea ) and the application level is better…
Why ?
So I don’t really know exactly why, but here are a few guesses:
- Last year, GSoC was a bit of a surprise for us. This year, we know way better what we can expect from students/mentors.
- Last year, VideoLAN was mentoring only for VLC media player, this year, we have VLC media player and x264 (we have roughly 70/15 applications for VLC/x264)
- Ideas were done mostly the same way, but we put more of them on our wiki this year. Ideas are more sized for a summer (see first reason)
- We added ideas cross projects (x264-VLC, VLC-other codecs libraries, VLC-FreePV)
- We added qualification tasks (VLC: compile VLC, provide a patch on the trunk, x264: more complex qualification tasks). This highered the quality.
- We have tried to work with other projects (some FFmpeg mentors can read our applications (and vice-versa), we accepted FFmpeg and x264 qualification tasks as an “ok” for us, …)
- We announced everything earlier and were more organised between mentors (ml, IRC, meetings…)
- We have a former student who is a mentor now.
- I have more time than last year during that phase… :D Must be because the sun is better in California than in France…
Many ideas were recommendations that came from the Mentor Summit, so I must say that this summit did help us a LOT.
Hope this can help some people…