Anton, Sergei and Kanwei; Thanks for all the interest and feedback on the GSoC idea. To be clear, I was hoping to spec out a project involving Galaxy along with NESCent's phyloinformatics group (https://www.nescent.org/wg_phyloinformatics/Main_Page), as opposed to applying separately for Galaxy as an organization. The latter is quite a bit more work and very competitive. I worked with NESCent last year and they are a great group.

The initial organizational application is starting to come together, and I put together a project idea based on what we've discussed thus far:

https://www.nescent.org/wg_phyloinformatics/Phyloinformatics_Summer_of_Code_...

The project idea gives interested students a basis for which they'll write a formal proposal with full details about what they plan to accomplish on a week by week basis. For now, we want to have something that looks good for the application which is due this Friday. Sergei, I know you are busy this week so no worries; I've put together enough to get the proposal in if you don't have time to look until later.

If NESCent is accepted as an organization, we have until March 26th to do additional edits on the project idea, and then students will start looking at them and developing full project proposals.

Any feedback about the idea and direction is more than welcome. You can create a wiki account and edit directly, or send general comments to me. Putting together an interesting and clear project idea will help get us accepted and attract good students to the project.

Thanks again. Excited about getting this together, Brad

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Anton and Sergei;

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Yes! One of guys on the Galaxy team is Sergei Kosakovsky Pond (the author of HyPhy and datamonkey.org), who will be able to play a leading role here. What is the timeframe?

Awesome. This sounds perfect; Sergei, I could definitely use your help in defining the specifics around what is most interesting to you and useful for Galaxy.

In terms of dates, we need to have an initial proposal refined by March 12th. Google then judges the applications; if we get accepted we have until March 26th to refine the proposal.

Student applications are from March 29th to April 9th, followed by judging and selection of students. The actual work period is from May 24th to August 16th.

Once the 2010 wiki is up and running, I will put together some initial text and then follow up here looking for more specific input. Thanks for getting involved with this,