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Summer of Code'08 Organizations List Announced
kulbirsaini writes "Google has announced the list of accepted organizations for the Google Summer of Code 2008. 'No doubt many would-be Summer of Code students are wondering what their next steps should be. We've changed the program timeline this year, leaving a week in between the announcement of accepted mentoring organizations and opening for student applications. Use this week to meet your potential mentors and discuss your project ideas with them, and keep on eye on the program mailing lists, as we'll post notes about additional resources for learning about our mentoring organizations.'"
Please take a look at our ideas list and let us know (summer-of-code@gnu.org) if you have any questions.
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In the FWIW dept: I spent several hours this afternoon monitoring the #gsoc forum. Kudos to lh for taking the time to critique the rejectees, I'm sure it was not easy.
It's apparent that the main criteria used to determine who gets a mentor org slot is (1) the size of the organization, (2) whether an org participated in years past, and (3) the quality of the ideas list. (Yes, all three criteria were confirmed at one point or another during the afternoon.) By my count, more than half of the 2008 mentoring orgs participated in 2007. When asked how this can possibly inject innovation and new ideas into the OSS community, one Google staffer replied that it's all about the students, and larger orgs can mentor more students than can smaller orgs. As for the ideas list: We were rejected on a technicality in that we didn't specify the *difficulty level* for each idea in our list.
So what did I come away with? A process that rewards organizations that seem to already have the resources necessary to attract new developers, and a process that falls back on technicalities to determine, in part, who makes the short list and who doesn't.
As one Google sysop replied rather testily to someone, "it's *our* money, so we can do what we want." Don't know if I'll waste my time again next year, since we will only be able to surmount just one of the three most heavily-weighted criteria. But at least now, we have a good idea of what the selection process entails.
The Nmap Security Scanner project has now participated in Summer of Code all three years—and mentored 25 students. So I'm pleased that Google has accepted us for a fourth year. This really is a great program, so I hope many Slashdotters apply (or at least spread the word to your student friends who may be too busy with school to read Slashdot). There aren't many opportunities available to get paid to work on free software of your choice. Your work makes a big difference for projects and their users as well. You can read about the successful Nmap SoC students in 2007, 2006, and 2005. No Nmap user can read those lists without recognizing features and improvements they use.
Of course part of the purpose of this post is to shamelessly plug the Nmap SoC ideas page for people trying to choose a project. We'd love to have you. But honestly, I recommend applying for multiple projects if you really want to get in. Don't just spam a bunch of crappy boilerplate applications, but submit as many carefully-considered ones as you have time to write. Also, I've written up some tips for preparing a great SoC application.
-Fyodor
Dojo is an Open Source DHTML toolkit written in JavaScript. It allows you to easily build dynamic capabilities into web pages and any other environment that supports JavaScript sanely. You can use the components that Dojo provides to make your web sites more useable, responsive, and functional.
So, thats what we do - and we're involved with the Summer of Code for the third time in 2008. And this summer we have lots of exciting stuff planned: charting, accessibility, visualizations, automated testing, 3d graphics, ... or suggest your own.
- Rob :)
There are plenty of people outside Redmond who still hate Google.
Some people are upset with the recent Google-Youtube-China situation. It's obviously not entirely Google's fault, but it's not a comfortable situation.
Lots of people think that Google has serious privacy problems. Not everyone thinks these are limited to its own data collection either--sometimes Google knows too much.
Some people think Google mis-manages its Adsense platform and hurts small publishers.
And lots of people are upset about PageRank -- from those who get a zero PR for no clear reason, to sites that get dropped, to anti-hate groups that dislike it when pro-hate groups get high rankings.
I don't know if any of those are GOOD reasons to hate Google, but plenty of people DO.
I see that many people have posted information about their projects etc., and for those who have done so, how much experience would I need to apply? I am interested in applying for a project but unfortunately I have not really worked with open source code before and will only have taken about a year of programming (Java/C++) at the university. What do people think is typical knowledge necessary for working on a Summer of Code project? (Sorry if this looks like spam, but I feel this is a serious question for the other half of interested people.)
> It's apparent that the main criteria used to determine who gets a mentor org slot is (1) the size of the organization, (2) whether an org participated in years past, and (3) the quality of the ideas list. (Yes, all three criteria were confirmed at one point or another during the afternoon.)
That is not my experience at all.
The Comprehensive C Archive Network org (a port of CPAN to C) was accepted, despite it being essentially only two or three main people (mostly Rusty Russel and I) with a mailing list and an irc channel, and only existing for 3-4 months.
So we apparently got through on the strength of our idea alone.
I'm stoked that Sahana - a project to develop a FOSS web-based system for disaster management has been selected again for GSOC. Thanks Goggle!
If you're interested in working on a system that will help ease suffering and save lives during and after a disaster, then consider contributing to the Sahana project. It was started after the Boxing Day Tsunami struck Sri Lanka and it now into our fourth year, and I think third GSOC year.
Some areas we're focusing hard on this year are incorporating social networking for disaster response, and implementing a more comprehensive GIS. We would welcome other suggestions.
Sahana@GSOC, Sahana GSOC ideas. If you want to discuss it more, join up to the Sahana maindev list on sf.net.
If you want to contribute to an humanitarian project for a change, Sahana may be the project for you. Of course, we've got plenty of technical opportunities as well ;)