I opened the GSoC organizations list halfway through in March 2026, incredibly late, I knew I was only a fortnight away from the GSoC application deadline and hadn't picked an organization yet.
My constraints were simple: Python-heavy, less crowd, and alive and responsive maintainers.
Scrolling down I looked for small orgs some of which were under other umbrella organizations and came across some orgs that met my needs.
-Wagtail looked almost perfect but their AI policy was strict and the competition was high, figured I would be wasting time especially after getting in late already.
-Alpha One Labs under OSL sounded approachable until I read their actual project ideas, every single one involved deep ML research or computer vision systems. Wasn't my territory.
Even went after the famous ones like Numpy but had to rule them out because the projects tend to require strong numerical computing background and they were crowded also.
After consulting with my friendly neighbor claude, I got some real good suggestions, one of which was Mailman.
All I had to do was check the issue publishing rate, the activity of my mentors and other fellow contributors, and the competition here just felt right. Their GitLab was actively maintained and maintainers responded within days, sometimes even in few hours.
They had one hard requirement: a merged MR before submitting a proposal. This was a nervous but definitely the best opportunity I could come across.
I managed to get two MRs merged (about which I will write separately).
The project that fit me best after my MRs was Per-List Backup and Restore something that the mentors saw as a real gap in the software that affected real administrators.
(Per-List Backup and Restore was a project that was listed by the organization only)
and that is how, I picked Mailman.
Navya,
checkout my gitlab!
[https://gitlab.com/Naveeeya]