[llvm-dev] LLVM GSOC Projects Criteria Consultation (before 2/28)

[Mehdi Amini via llvm-dev]

Hello all,

GSOC is around the corner, and the LLVM projects plans to participate again this year. For those who don’t know about GSOC, students are proposing a project that they will work on for 3 months. Amongst other, one goal for LLVM is to mentor students to become good developers and also contributors to the LLVM project (or user/advocate of LLVM for building other cool projects).

A key part of the process is about how do we select the projects. The way we’ve done it last year, is that the volunteer mentors shared an email thread and ultimately each one individually ranked the projects. We kept the average grading for each project to ranked them overall.

 In order to make the process more transparent to student applicants, we want to formalize and announce the criteria for ranking and selection project.

The purpose of this email is to gather community feedback about the criterion that mentors should apply when ranking projects, for example:

- Should we favor a student which has past contributions to LLVM compared to a newcomer? Is it more important or as equally important as the quality of the proposal?
- How should we rank (if any) “research or unbounded projects” vs “project with an immediate application”? Should we strive to keep a balance?
- What about “projects that touch LLVM/Clang/…” vs “projects that are building something on top of LLVM”? (For example this project was first proposed to be selected by LLVM before being rejected and finally picked by the Julia project directly: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/archive/2016/projects/6197080536121344/ )?
- Should we ask that the work is done upstream all along? In the past there have been project developed on GitHub outside the community that have never been merged. The LLVM developer policy has a full section insisting on incremental development ( http://llvm.org/docs/DeveloperPolicy.html#incremental-development ).

Hopefully we should be able to provide a set of guidelines to student that would help them fill the best application, and avoid unfortunate surprise at the end of the process.

We should have this discussion before receiving the projects proposals, which opens on 2/28.

Best,

-- 
Mehdi

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