Re:My observations (Score 3, Informative)

By my count, more than half of the 2008 mentoring orgs participated in 2007. When asked how this can possibly inject innovation and new ideas into the OSS community, one Google staffer replied that it's all about the students, and larger orgs can mentor more students than can smaller orgs. As for the ideas list: We were rejected on a technicality in that we didn't specify the *difficulty level* for each idea in our list.

That's just silly. My project (Mercurial) is tiny (in terms of number of developers), we hadn't participated before, and we sure didn't have difficulty levels for each idea in our list. In fact, someone (me) just spent a few hours or so setting up a page with some ideas of things we haven't gotten to yet, trolling around for developers to become mentors and then I filed the application (and okay, I did spend some time thinking about my answers to their questions). All in all, it was maybe 8 to 10 hours work (and we never participated before, otherwise it would have been a little easier).

I was also in the channel at the time of the feedback session, and it sounded to me like they were doing the best they can to make it a fair process. Having about half of the organizations be projects that participated before sounds like it makes perfect sense to me: for one thing, some projects just play a big role and have large impact, so it's good if they get a bunch of students to help out. For the other, having a successful track record seems like it should be a differentiator in the selection process.

I particularly liked the part where people who were involved with the project they were deciding on were sent out of the room for the decision, and the part where projects who tried to get in by sending some extra email to the OSS group at Google or tried capitalizing on their personal connections where declined for participation, just to try and keep it fair. Also, the fact that they provided *personal feedback* to any person from a rejected project who asked! (This was done in order of timezone, to help people get some sleep... If that's not considerate, I don't know what is.)