Statistical analysis on previous GSoCs

Posted by webchick on April 11, 2013 at 5:46am

Out of morbid curiosity, I started going through previous GSoC years at http://drupal.org/google-summer-of-code and compiling data about students, projects, mentors, and whether or not they're still around.

You can find it here (just 2005 so far):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AusehVccVSq2dEVrdnRLRlpGZXN...

If anyone else feels the urge to help with this, that'd be awesome! Else I'll probably pick away at it over the next while.

Comments

I can help with that. Will

Posted by slashrsm on April 11, 2013 at 12:10pm

I can help with that. Will take 2011 for start.

Janez Urevc - software engineer @ Examiner.com - @slashrsm - janezurevc.name

I just added the 2009

Posted by kreynen on April 11, 2013 at 4:43pm

I just added the 2009 projects. That was the first year I was involved in GSoC, but I came from the Creative Commons side where they happened to have a Drupal project. I had been following along with Drupal's GSoC doing small things like reviewing project proposals until I ended up "mentoring" @slashrsm on his Media Derivatives project.

Mentoring is a strong word for my role in that project. I had used Media Mover in D6 and was already sold on the benefits of the PHP Stream Warppers structure in Media for D7. While I think it will be useful to review this data, I'm not sure we'll be able to draw to many conclusions. There are a lot of external factors that need to be taken into account like how Drupal is seen as a technology compared to the organizations/projects we're competing with to get proposals from talented students. Is Drupal seen as an platform used by organizations young people are familiar with or is it related more closely with words like enterprise, establishment, legacy? There is also the increased level of complexity to consider. Is it still the case where anyone with object oriented experience could look at some part of Drupal and say... I can do that better!

Still, there are a lot of success stories in this data...

For 2009, I tried to follow the code where projects like @klausi's Rule Monkey was rolled into Rules and @drunken monkey's original Apache Solr RDF project was deprecated in favor of the Search API he also maintains.

Some of these projects don't directly to usage of a module or install profile like the work @marvil07 and @haxney did on version control. Other indirectly have had a HUGE impact like @jmstacey pushing to get PHP Stream Wrappers into D7 as part of his project.

One really odd things came up when reviewing these projects. It looks like Jim Berry had 2 GSoC projects using 2 different usernames (solotandem and boombatower). That can't be right, can it?