[Biojava-l] gsoc update

[Andreas Prlic]

Hi,

As you have probably read by now, this year's OBF students for the
Google summer of code are going to other Bio* projects, and none for
BioJava. This has to do with several factors:

- Overall applications were down by 53% this year
- None of the BioJava related proposals was scored high enough

In order to help students prepare stronger proposals for next year, I
believe we should try to prepare things differently:

- More concrete project topics from our side. Our approach to provide
open topics and let student fill in details did not work well this
year.
- Less challenging topics, some of our topics were perhaps too difficult.
- Overall we should try to have more mentors comment on the list and
help students prepare good project plans.
- More marketing so we can spread the word to more students.

I want to thank all students and potential mentors who invested time
into this. Even if we did not succeed this time, I do hope we all
learnt something in the process and can find a way to work together on
BioJava also beyond the scope of GSoC.

Andreas