Congratulations and Welcome to GSOC 2016 Students

[Suresh Marru <sm...@apache.org>]

First and foremost congratulations to every one who have applied for GSOC for Apache Airavata based projects. This year we had many quality proposals and great effort from you all. If you did not make it into the program, do not be disappointed. GSOC goal is to help introduce you to open source. You have already done that through your interactions and contributions. I encourage you to continue on irrespective of the GSOC tag. Airavata and other Apache projects value your volunteer contributions and eventually meritocratically reward you with committer privileges and project management committee memberships. 

For the students who made it through the program, congratulations and sorry that you to very hard now. 

Its important to remind yourself that GSOC is an opportunities to embrace the open source cluster. A key philosophy we follow on apache is “it it did not happen on mailing lists it did not”. So a key evaluation criteria will be how well you are communicating and engaging others. 

Few things you want to get done during the community bonding period which started today:

* Get your laptop working environment with Airavata
* Make sure you are subscribed to all mailing lists - http://airavata.apache.org/mailing-list.html
* Engage and familiarize yourself with whats happening in Airavata. 
* Make a small bug fix and send a pull request. 

Cheers,
Suresh