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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.
Join the Free Software Foundation
Google has been very good to the Open Source gaming community again this year, there are a total of 7 game projects and 5 game related projects.
The following game projects have been accepted,
The Summer of Code had a huge impact my own project, Thousand Parsec and I hope that it will again have a significant positive impact. GSoC 2007 helped us develop a number of core utilities that the main developers just would not have time to do. These projects should substantially increase the productivity of new contributors and lower the barrier to entry into development. The huge amount of web traffic brought to our website from just being a mentor organisation can clearly be seen in our web statistics.
This year we are planning to concentrate on improving the player experience. The two ways for achieving this is to create more full and interesting games (rulesets) and making the game clients more attractive and easier to access (such as a web-based client and improving the desktop client).
Out of the three students that where selected last year, two passed their final evaluations. The code that the students produced was of both a high quality and quantity.
One of the students projects, the RFTS clone ruleset, is now one of the most complete and popular of our games (rulesets). The student has continued to help with its development and is now currently considering being a mentor this year.
The other successful student made over 220 commits and produced 28,824 lines of code, more than some of our other long term project members! He has developed a ruleset editor which will make ruleset development significantly easier in the future.
As well, the Open Source Office funded one student in a Summer of Code style outside the program. The student successfully completed the project and we hope the code will soon be rolled out.
Because of the success of our GSoC, our project has actively started to engage with educational instit
Thousand Parsec - http://www.thousandparsec.net/
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 :)
Prospective gsoc student participants interested in improving Free Software Desktop Publishing are invited to look at Scribus Team's ideas list at http://wiki.scribus.net/index.php/GsoC_2008_Ideas. We are starting our second GSoC year and are looking for good student coders to improve the *nix/MacOX/Win32 Desktop Layout Software. Come in to #scribus on Freenode if you'd like to talk to us or join our mailing list at http://nashi.altmuehlnet.de/mailman/listinfo/scribus. We are open and quite friendly.
Alex
Scribus Team's GSoC Administrator
Perhaps you should have read this: Notes on Organizations Selection Criteria . It is linked from the question '5. What kind of mentoring organizations should apply?' in the section about Mentoring organisations in the FAQ.
It gives 6 points: have you participated before, your ideas list, the quality of your application, does google use your software, does google know you, and does giving you money help the wider Open Source community.
BRL-CAD is delighted to be participating in the Google Summer of Code this year for the first time. Be sure to check out our ideas list and either stop by the #brlcad IRC channel on Freenode or subscribe to our developer's mailing list to get involved early.
As many know, computer-aided design (CAD) is one of the areas most lacking attention in open source. BRL-CAD has a solid foundation and considerable 25-year development history with more than 450 person-years development effort invested yet we are still wholesomely lacking in the usability and user-interface department. Maybe some of you can help us fix that. We're interested in many other ideas as well. Hope to see you apply!
Cheers!
Sean
Through the Videolan project, x264 is accepting SoC applications this year. We don't have many mentors though... so the competition will be tough!
Drop by #x264dev on Freenode and get involved in the qualification tasks before its too late... more information can be found here.
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.
> 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.
At a minimum, I'd suggest a good understanding of the language, And preferably, also knowing how the organisations code works.
Just because you know PHP, It doesnt mean you're going to know the ins and outs of how NextGen Gallery works, You need to know PHP & you need to know how Gallery code is structured(and the functions, and how to interface them, etc).
Thats not to say that you wouldnt pick up the way Gallerys code works easily(Just a note here, I've never looked at Galleries code, it cant be that complicated, i'm just using it as a example), but knowing how the code works beforehand is a great bonus.
I know basic C++, Java, VB/C.Net, so much that i can do simple stuff in them, and might even manage to write a decent small program, But i've got nowhere near enough experience with the languages to work with a organisation who has such code.
Take WordPress as another example, Knowing the way it works, how posts are published, how to use actions and filters, is a great bonus. If you only know basic PHP, and dont understand actions and filters and whatnot, it could be harder to complete the project than what its worth.
However, Keep in mind, that not all summer of code projects require programming, Documentation, Usability studies, Social bug tracking(whatever that is), could be equally as good projects, they dont require programming skills, just other types of skills.
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 ;)
That's just silly. My project (Mercurial) is tiny (in terms of number of developers), we hadn't participated before, and we sure didn't have difficulty levels for each idea in our list. In fact, someone (me) just spent a few hours or so setting up a page with some ideas of things we haven't gotten to yet, trolling around for developers to become mentors and then I filed the application (and okay, I did spend some time thinking about my answers to their questions). All in all, it was maybe 8 to 10 hours work (and we never participated before, otherwise it would have been a little easier).
I was also in the channel at the time of the feedback session, and it sounded to me like they were doing the best they can to make it a fair process. Having about half of the organizations be projects that participated before sounds like it makes perfect sense to me: for one thing, some projects just play a big role and have large impact, so it's good if they get a bunch of students to help out. For the other, having a successful track record seems like it should be a differentiator in the selection process.
I particularly liked the part where people who were involved with the project they were deciding on were sent out of the room for the decision, and the part where projects who tried to get in by sending some extra email to the OSS group at Google or tried capitalizing on their personal connections where declined for participation, just to try and keep it fair. Also, the fact that they provided *personal feedback* to any person from a rejected project who asked! (This was done in order of timezone, to help people get some sleep... If that's not considerate, I don't know what is.)