Xapian GSoC Applications for 2012

Student applications for GSoC closed a day or so ago, and we've done an initial pass through Xapian's applications, so I thought I should post another overview, similar to last year's.

We received a total of 41 applications this year (very close to last year's total of 42). Here's a graph of applications against time:

If you're an admin or a mentor, you can produce a similar graph for your own org(s) - just download this OpenDocument spreadsheet and follow the instructions inside.

That total of 41 includes one duplicate and one application withdrawn by the student (we had one of each last year too). I've also gone through and marked nine spam proposals as invalid (similar to the seven we had last year). Spam proposals are things like proposals with no connection at all to Xapian, and proposals which are just a title and/or paste from our ideas list with a generic biography.

So that leaves us with 30 proposals (compared to 33 last year). It's hard to really measure, but my feeling is that the average quality is higher than last year (and it was already pretty impressive last year).