Dear Boost Community, The Google Summer of Code 2015 proposals for Boost are in, and we would deeply appreciate the community's help in ranking the proposals according to merit before the 6th of April. To vote, the process is easy: 1. Go to this page https://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/homepage/google/gsoc2015 and click the "Log in" button under Mentors and Administrators. 2. Now click "Create Profile" on the same page. Note that even if you registered last year, you must register again in 2015. Fill in the form. Note that after submitting it drops you at "Edit Profile", which is confusing. 3. Click "My Dashboard", then "Connect with organisations". 4. Choose "Boost C++ Libraries". 5. In the message box, write this: "I am a member of the Boost community and the email(s) I normally post to boost mailing lists with is <email>" filling in the email address(es) you normally use to post to boost mailing lists. This lets us verify that you are indeed a long standing member of the Boost community. 6. Once we approve your request, you will get an email with the subject "Welcome as organisation member". You can now return to the Dashboard on the GSoC website where there will be a new item "Proposals". 7. Work your way through as many of the 33 proposals as you can. You can score them using the stars at the bottom of each proposal page, taking care to read any comments by the mentors and students if present. PLEASE try to rank some of the lowest scored proposals, every year we get a lot of people who only rank the top five and don't bother with the rest. Try to score on the priority basis of: (i) ability to write quality C++, using the programming competency test or samples of programming the student supplied. (ii) proposal quality and your best estimate of the student's understanding of how best to solve the problem at hand. Bear in mind a gifted programmer with a strong work ethic but poor English may appear to not understand the problem as well as native English speakers, this is why we have asked for examples of their programming competency. (iii) if the student came early to the mailing lists to ask for help writing the proposal (the mentors who helped them with their proposals have usually indicated this in the private comments). (iv) usefulness/appropriateness of the feature or work being proposed. Remember a good GSoC is more about getting promising new engineers into Boost and C++ than necessarily getting code to pass Boost peer review in a single summer. 8. Optional: If a proposal looks especially great to you and you feel able to mentor a student this year, please slide the "wish to mentor" button. Just because a proposal already has willing mentors does NOT mean you should not add yourself - if you can substitute for an existing mentor, that may mean we use that mentor for another proposal. As you know, Google Summer of Code is usually worth $42,000 - $48,000 to Boost each year, and a successful GSoC raises our visibility and reputation in the wider open source community. Our thanks to you in advance for taking the time to vote. Niall Douglas Boris Schäling --- Boost C++ Libraries Google Summer of Code 2015 admin https://svn.boost.org/trac/boost/wiki/SoC2015