I hope I’m not bringing up bad memories, but can someone (perhaps @hlapp?) tell us a little about Google’s response to the phyoinformatics GSOC application? Was there something special about this year, or was it shifting priorities on their part?
You all have a very strong track record with them in the past! It would be great to continue this program.
@karen_cranston would be the one to comment in detail. There were so many bioinformatics organizations applying (which is a great thing, and a remarkable change to when we first participated) that they needed to reject some organizations that had participated in the past in order to make room for new ones.
FYI, Google has regularly shuffled things up - many large and very prominent organizations have failed to get accepted in some years. For example, OBF was rejected last year, but got in again this year. The Perl Foundation was out in the past and is in this year. The R foundation is also out this year.
Hilmar’s summary is spot on. It is unfortunate, but there is no need to think that this eliminates a phyloinformatics summer of code from future years (although, the end of NESCent funding will require new folks to step up for admin).