gwern0:
(The following is a quasi essay/list of past Summer of Code projects; my hope is to guide thinking about what Summer of Code projects would be good to pick, and more specifically what should be avoided. If you're in a hurry, my conclusions are at the bottom. The whole thing is written in Markdown; for best results pass it through Pandoc or view it via your friendly local Gitit wiki.)
Thanks for the write up! We explicitly pushed harder in 2008 to clarify and simplify the goals of the projects, ensure adequate *prior Haskell experience* and to focus on libraries and tools that directly benefit the communtity. And our success rate was much higher. So: look for things that benefit the largest number of Haskell developers and users, and from students with proven Haskell development experience. You can't learn Haskell from zero on the job, during SoC. -- Don