Alternative schedule(s)

Hello list, I'm a final year student in Romania and I've successfully completed a GSOC on the Fedora Project last year. I'd love to participate in this year's FSC and have been working on a proposal since before the sad news about Fedora and GSOC was announced. There's a bit of an overlap between the FSC/GSOC schedule and the schedule of Romanian colleges. In Romania, the summer holiday generally starts in July, with the new school year starting in October. I know quite a few students who couldn't participate in GSOC in the last years because of exams. Even so, judging by GSOC statistics, Romania has one college rated as 4th for number of students last year and another rated 10th for the number of students in 2005-2009 [1]. So I'm wondering if we can tweak FSC's schedule a bit in order to accommodate more people (and make it less stressful for myself :) ). I've seen some discussion about an year-round summer coding, but I'm wondering if we can do anything for this year as well. Since the ideas/proposal submitting time has already started and this period is free from exams, everyone could submit their proposals now. They would get notified of accepted/rejected status by the end of the month, but start working at different times. Couldn't we have two different periods: the one we have now, and a delayed one (1 July - 15 September -ish)? Or if that fails, I know there was talk about bigger and smaller ideas. Could we have half-proposals, with work starting at midterm evaluation date and only half the money? I know the RubySOC guys have "Half Project Sponsors"[2] which probably makes it easier to get more sponsors, though they probably don't also have half-work proposals. I'm probably seeing this over-simplified (from the student's POV), but what are the affected/disadvantaged parties by having two summer coding periods? Can't we work with them to make this a more flexible SOC? We could also compete better with other SOCs this way :) Thanks, Ionuț [1] http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/09/tasty-new-google-summer-of-... [2] http://rubysoc.org/sponsors