Hi all,
Here's a heads-up that this year's Google of Code is kicking off. My experience from the last few years is that we can maximize the output we get from GSoC by being proactive and writing down semi-detailed explanations of what kind of projects we'd like to see, instead of letting the students pick themselves*. Here's three examples of such write-ups I did last year:
Concretely:
1. Write down the project suggestions somewhere (e.g. on the wiki, your blog, etc).
2. Advertise the projects on haskell-cafe, reddit, twitter, Google+
3. Profit.
* The students tend to not know what makes a good GSoC project and often aim for something too difficult, like writing a new project from scratch instead of contributing to an old one. Contributing to widely used libraries or infrastructure usually results in
* a larger benefit for the community, and
* the students sticking around.
My guess is that the student tend to stick around after the project is done if they contribute to infrastructure projects, as they'll see their stuff get used and will get feature requests/bug reports that will make them continue working on the project.
-- Johan