It’s been a great weekend, but I’ve just found out something horrifically frustrating 
Expect more blogging on the weekend when I get to Germany (just in the airport now), but I want to get the frustration out of my system first 
My Google Summer of Code application looks highly likely to be rejected. That on its own isn’t a big problem. But there are comments on it asking for elaboration/explanation of some stuff, that I never saw. I looked for comments previously (and after the dates that these were posted), but didn’t see any – and I didn’t get any kind of email or other notification. I don’t know if they were there before and just hidden, or not there at all – like I said, I looked for comments, and couldn’t find any, but I can’t swear to it that they weren’t there either.
Either way, I didn’t respond to them, and it now seems pretty unlikely I’ll be accepted for the program, without the extra information. That really, really bugs me – I might not have been accepted if I had responded to them, but I’d at least have had a chance. And I’ll likely still do the project – but it would have been really nice to have gotten paid for it, and to have gotten money for the ASF by doing it. What’s more, I had deliberately included several pieces of contact information in my proposal, precisely in case someone wanted clarifications…
Bugger anyway.
Update: At 07:25UTC today, I got an email from the Google Summer of Code saying my application had been accepted. Happy days, until 07:33UTC, when they sent out the email apologising for the previous email, and confirming that I had been rejected. This after initially saying everyone would have an answer by 22nd May, and then updating that to 23rd May. Really, really poor show guys. If you need three days to finalise things and get the notifications right, take it. Hell, if you need a week, take it. But be upfront, set realistic expectations, and above all, don’t do double-takes like that.
Frankly speaking the infrastructure around GSoC pretty much sucked. They improved it – but it still has a fair way to go. Once we found out students don’t get notified about comments (we expected that to happen as well) we did send out a few heads up mails. But there were just too many applications to go through to do that by hand. So – sorry about your application. Next time try to communicate more pro-actively with the project community you want to work with and things like that just cannot happen. Don’t be too disappointed. We “only” had 25 slots and and a lot of good proposals anyway. So a proposal without the need to ask questions is a better proposal. Next time make sure yours is one of them. And maybe implement your project anyway. A student backed up by a community always has a better chance. I am sure that will help to get you an award next year.
I deliberately didn’t get in touch with the mentor listed for the project I wanted to do, because he’s someone I know personally, and I didn’t want there to be any potential to be seen to be canvassing, or trying to get an unfair advantage
I guess I just had to take the risk that it would put me at an unfair disadvantage.
I don’t think there’ll be a ‘next time’, to be honest. I’m not the kind of person to keep going and going at something, when there are other possibilities to try, and I hope that by next summer, I’ll have more gainful employment
[...] This is my take on the “why are women so underrepresented in technology in general, and open source in particular” debate, inspired by several things that have come up lately – primarily the publication of the FLOSSPOLS report of findings & recommendations, a thread on the women@apache mailing list, and a seemingly innocent comment on my Frustrations! post… [...]
A student backed up by a community always has an oppurtunity either it also help to get an award…maybe for next year.