Hey everybody,

we are almost overwhelmed by the large amount of students interested in our organization. Thanks so much for spending your time with us! It is an awesome feeling to see how many of you got to know us and like us - Unknown Horizons will definitely benefit from this summer. Let's get started!

The application period for the Summer of Code has not yet officially begun and we already received more than a dozen great applications. Sure, that feels very good at first glance, but sadly there is a massive drawback as well :-/ Unknown Horizons is a rather small mentoring organization. We definitely can not accept everybody, so we will have to reject a lot of impressive work which we would love to see hammered at. Of course we can always help you if you decide to stay around with our team despite our small mentoring capabilities!

If you have the time to do so, please do not only focus on UH if you really want to make it into the program. We need to disappoint a lot of you :-( At least have a backup application somewhere with less competition. It is however very important to still show enthusiasm for both (or all) projects when writing more than one application!

We do not know how many slots Google allocates to us (Learn how this works) - but because we received so many great applications, we decided to be fair about your chances on each idea right away.
We will accept one student for FIFE and one for GUI. This leaves us with two mentors (totycro & Nihathrael) and four possible UH ideas. Reducing mentoring quality and allocating more than one project per mentor is a bad idea for our first year, so two of the remaining four ideas will probably not be accepted at all. Despite how useful and fun working on them might be for both student and organization.
Right now, we see no way but to review applications in the end and decide on the best proposal, then continue this without all proposals made for the selected idea. We however have mentor meetings left to discuss our policy concerning this, please do not take us up on this news entry. Just trying to keep competition as fair as we can do.

Update: The above does not hold any longer. We decided on a different strategy.

Attention with our AI idea! You will have a mentor to answer all questions concerning UH. We however lack an experienced AI coder - which is why we haven't implemented AI on our own so far ;-) - and thus need someone with rather strong AI background to apply for this idea. If you feel a bit uncomfortable with not having a mentor to discuss the actual AI implementation, you're probably better off with another idea. Please accept our apologies.

Again: We are so sorry for all the rejects we will need to announce. Do not feel less of a student or coder - you are not. Let's close with how totycro expressed this situation in our IRC channel:

i mean, i probably wouldn't be accepted in a competition, i don't really have that much fancy stuff to show. nevertheless i wrote quite a part of the current code base, and most of it actually works ;)

Kind regards and all the best,
your team of Unknown Horizons!