So, Bongo didn’t make it into Google’s Summer of Code, but we did get some nice feedback from them. There’s good news and bad news 🙂

The good news is that they thought our application was very well done, and it was basically because they don’t have room for everyone that we didn’t get in: it sounds like we would have been acceptable, it just wasn’t our roll of the die. Unfortunate, but fair enough – I do suspect that Google have a theme or themes for each GSoC, and it might just be that we didn’t fit well this year.

The “bad” news is, there isn’t an awful lot they suggested we could do to improve. Two specific suggestions were made: that we add a list of required skills to each idea on the wiki, and that we classify them easy/medium/hard. Both of which are great suggestions, although I thought that our ideas were already better formed than other projects. But, I’m comparing us to some other projects which are probably “shoe-ins” (I get the sense many of the bigger projects know that they’re getting in every year, and don’t make the same effort).

They also said that they’d welcome an application from us next year, which I take as meaning that our application stood a good chance of getting through. We might be better prepared for students next year, anyway 🙂