It's GSOC time again, the 2016 iteration starts with mentoring organization submissions on 8th february. I think I will have quite some time this year to become a mentor, and would like to do this very much (mentoring a student here at work too). So my proposal is to apply for a slot at GSOC 2016 with freecad. Maybe the BRLCAD/LibreCAD guys are applying again too, so it may be a good idea going into contact with them. Of course I'm not a main developper, so this is me inquerying if it is ok to do so and to go the GSOC route. I would handle the formal work, applications and stuff. Of course if others want to mentor too, please join in

I do have a few ideas on which I like to have a student working, the two main ones are connected to the new part design. I provide a short Idea here, if we go for GSOC I create a wiki page with more details:
1. Advance freecad test system: Provide functionality to do a file-based result comparision, for example allow to store a file with the expected document object structure together with the test case and provide a function to compare the test result with this expected structure. Multiple such comparators are possible and will make writing complex tests much easier. Also handling input files for tests and all the file storing could be automated. (I like this for the new part design as I recently noticed that the whole complexity of the workbench is very hard to handle, fixing one thing may break annother which worked few months back... we need to create more unit-tests.)
2. Topological Naming: With the new Part Design we further stress the freecad linking system, it is time to handle those more gracefully. I do have a few Ideas how to handle links in a mixed way, using occ's topological naming as well as a comparison approach. A student could at least start with implementation and provide the framework for us to finally handle chaning links.
yorik, Werner, Juergen, would this be ok with you?