Writing a Phyloinformatics Project Idea
From NESCent Informatics Wiki
A critical part of an organizational application to the Google Summer of Code is the list of project ideas. Here are some guidelines about writing a suitable and well-scoped project idea:
- The problem should be scoped so that it is tractable by a student (who may not know all the technologies yet) over a period of 12 weeks of programming.
- Students will be working remotely the entire time. Project ideas requiring face-to-face contact or a nearby office with the student are unsuitable for GSoC (although such projects may arise, and are acceptable, if you get an application from a student in your local grad student community).
- Google stipulates that the project be about programming (and not documentation, or wet-lab experiments, for example).
- The code to be written (as well as the software project that is the context) need to be open-source licensed (with an OSI-approved license), and its source code needs to be publicly downloadable (or, better yet, already in a publicly accessible source code repository).
- Team up with others who may be interested in co-mentoring a student on your project idea. Empirical evidence suggests that at least 2 mentors (one primary, one backup) per student are best. We will eventually need someone to be designated as the primary mentor among a group of co-mentors, but this need not be decided until the stage in which student applications are ranked.
- Enter your project idea on the Ideas page before the mentoring organization application is submitted. If we are accepted, you can add details and refine the project later.
- Keep in mind that the students will write the project proposals, not you. A project idea should be just that - an idea, albeit well thought through.
- Absolutely use the phylosoc@nescent.org mailing list to get feedback about your project idea, or offer feedback on other ideas.
