One of the things that I found helpful in writing my proposal was to look at succesful proposals from previous years. This helped me gain an appreciation for the depth and breadth utilized in previous accepted proposals. On this note, I’d like to post the proposal I used for 2009 – Improving Search and Virtual Folders in KDE4.
Of course, this may also be useful to people who are just interested in my project this summer.
This year I have been accepted for the Google Summer of Code, for the mentoring organization KDE. I am incredibly excited to get to know the folks from KDE (my application abstract is here) – from my experiences reading their blogs and other materials they seem to be a very close and friendly community.
My project’s primary proposal is to implement what I see as one of the biggest deficiencies in KDE – the lack of a full-featured search feature. Being my preferred desktop environment, it was slightly disappointing to see this left undone. A little searching, however, revealed that all of the backend code is actually there – it is merely some front-end work that needs to be accomplished. This got my very worked up for a bit as I realized what I could do to remedy this situation – and so I submitted my application for GSoC 2009. I think it is a great thing that I have the opportunity to contribute to my most-used and favorite open source project, and I’d like to thank all the nice folks at KDE and Google for making this happen.