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Google Summer of Code Announces Mentor Projects

Posted by timothy on from the everyone-gets-a-free-mentors-album-too dept.

mithro writes "As everyone should already know, Google is running the Summer of Code again this year. For those who don't know, GSoC is where Google funds student's to participate in Open Source projects and has been running for 5 years, bringing together over 2600 students and 2500 mentors from nearly 100 countries worldwide. Google has just announced the projects which will be mentor organizations this year. It includes a great list of Open Source projects from a wide range of different genres, include content management systems, compilers, many programming languages and even a bunch of games!"

17 of 44 comments (clear)

  1. Pidgin is on the list... by Thelasko · · Score: 2

    maybe they will finally get video and audio chat working.

    --
    One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
  2. Long term plan by Thelasko · · Score: 3, Informative

    Looking at the site, I noticed that Ubuntu has a list of projects to work on which are mostly from the Brainstorm site. Most of the other projects have no such plan. I think this is what puts Ubuntu ahead of so many other open source projects.

    --
    One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
  3. A real education by rm999 · · Score: 4, Funny

    "GSoC is where Google funds student's to participate in Open Source projects"

    Maybe they should fund a class in grammar and spelling first :P

    1. Re:A real education by larry+bagina · · Score: 2, Informative

      student's

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  4. Re:Success stories by Chabo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Supposedly last year's GSoC helped a great deal with FFmpeg, Pidgin, and Rockbox, among others.

    --
    Convert FLACs to a portable format with FlacSquisher
  5. I'd like to try this out... by spiffmastercow · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm just intimidated by the magnitude of the requested projects. Anyone have any experience with GSoC? How much mentoring do you tend to get? I'd hate to sign up, then not know where to get started, or hit a brick wall, and be told "well you should have thought of that before you applied".

    1. Re:I'd like to try this out... by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 5, Informative

      I participated twice so far, applying again this year just because I enjoy it.

      My mentoring experience was very uneven. One mentor was very good, the other very crap. I completed my projects for both without a hitch, but the time without a good mentor was much more difficult.

      It's a little bit of a crapshoot. You're more likely to get in if you target smaller groups, but you're more likely to get good support if you target larger groups. YMMV.

      --
      "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
    2. Re:I'd like to try this out... by FishWithAHammer · · Score: 2, Informative

      Uh...I knew how to program pretty much cold when I went in. I started when I was very young, though, so it's a little more natural to me than some folks.

      Whatever language you choose, you'd better be good at it. Your mentors will help you with project requirements, etc. if you get selected (and you should be hanging out in their IRC chats, talking with them, figuring out what they want to do, and getting your name in their minds), but they will expect you to be a solid programmer who doesn't need to be hand-held.

      I don't really recommend any groups in particular. For example, the Drupal guys seem way nice (not a group I've worked for, but one I'll be applying to this year), but generally expect some solid community interaction beforehand. WinLibre is a group that's kind of really dysfunctional, with only one or two people involved--who also happen to be your mentors; that was the organization I had the worst time with. Nice guys, not the right kind of org for GSoC.

      You're best off scattergunning a lot of quality applications to a lot of groups. My first year, I applied to 12, and got accepted for my favorite one. My second year, I applied to 3, and got accepted to two of them (one I knew was an acceptance, so that was foregone and I wasn't worried about getting too many apps in). This year, I don't have such a guaranteed project lying around, so I'll be going with as many quality applications as I can manage.

      --
      "You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
  6. Re:Success stories by vinn · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yup - Wine has had quite a bit of success with these projects. Here's a link:

    We have all sorts of people apply to work on our SoC projects. The most successful SoC projects are ones where the student already has active involvement in the community and has already committed patches.

    --
    ----- obSig
  7. Re:Success stories by Ironica · · Score: 2, Informative

    OpenMRS benefited from last year's SoC, and is on the list this year, too. Millions of people around the world are getting health care that's assisted by OpenMRS.

    --
    Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
  8. Student's? by zindorsky · · Score: 4, Funny

    Google funds student's

    Google funds a student's what?

    Here's a link to explain 3rd grade grammar:

    Bob's Quick Guide to the Apostrophe, You Idiots

    --
    If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
    1. Re:Student's? by bar-agent · · Score: 2, Funny

      Um, I once accidently a student's...

      --
      i'd hit it so hard, if you pulled me out you'd be the king of britain [bash.org]
  9. Debian is participating and welcoming students by GrAfFiT · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Debian is welcoming students once again this year. I was a 2008 GSoC student at Debian and am returning this year to admin the GSoC program at Debian. I had a very exciting experience, participating in meetups with a lot of Debian developers all over Europe and I recommend you to apply at Debian to share this experience.

    We have a huge range of project possibilities, from our famous packaging system (.deb ftw) to debian-specific developer tools and infrastructure (want to work on our multi-arch distributed build farm ?) or hardware support (because Debian runs everywhere, from tiny ARM devices to country-wide computing grids). We have you all covered.

    Remember that Debian and its derivatives are the largest group of Linux distributions in the world. That's a huge community you'll be working with, and I should say, an amazing concentration of talent.

    If you are interested, visit: http://wiki.debian.org/gsoc, join us on IRC on: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org or follow us on twitter of identi.ca (DebianGSoC).

    Also, see our mailing-list announcement for more pratical information.

  10. Re:Success stories by jeffstar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    i recall one student's work was pretty much ignored. He modified gnome so different workspaces could have different background images.

    maybe the changes were too obtrusive or unmaintainable, but to me it points to a poor mentor. The mentor should have helped the student implement the changes in such a way that they could be accepted.
    see the student's blog with the gnome bugzilla links.

  11. Applying This Year! by Eli+Gottlieb · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm applying with a group of students from UMass to write Java bindings for the LLVM intermediate-code generation libraries. Anyone want to help?

  12. The project that will end in a few years! by Sybert42 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Opencog and the Singularity Institute. When it's done, there won't be any more summer of codes. You'll become the code--seriously.

  13. Google Summer of Code 2009 and The Perl Foundation by duke_leto · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The Perl Foundation was accepted as an organization in Google Summer of Code 2009! I am excited to be the organization administrator.

    Students interested in learning more about applying for GSoC2009 with TPF can join the mailing list and read up on The Perl Foundation wiki . For breaking news you can follow me at @dukeleto or join us on IRC on #soc-help on irc.perl.org .

    Parrot Foundation is within the umbrella of The Perl Foundation this year, so if you want to work on the hottest virtual machine that just hit 1.0.0, then you are in the right place.

    Remember, student applications are due at ~Noon PDT April 3rd 2009. That is surprisingly soon.

    Hope to see lots of great applications coming down the pipe!

    --
    http://leto.net