If you’re not familiar with the concept, a post on the Google Open Source Blog explained, “Google Summer of Code is a global program where university students are given a stipend to write code for open source projects over a three month period.  Through Google Summer of Code, accepted students are paired with a mentor from the participating projects, gaining exposure to real-world software development and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits.”

That stipend amounts to $5,000 per person, by the way, so even if Google or the mentoring acquisition doesn’t make a job offer, participants aren’t exactly laboring for free.

Also, the program isn’t nearly as exclusive as you might imagine (and we mean that in a good way).  Google allowed 1,026 students to participate in 2010, and may back as many as 1,176 this year, meaning lots of individuals will get to benefit.

So students should by all means consider applying to the Google Summer of Code program.  Since the deadline isn’t until April 8th, everyone still has time to review the 175 accepted projects and write up how they’d contribute.

Plenty more information is available here if anyone’s interested.  Good luck to all of the applicants.

Shashank Agrawal is enrolled in a dual degree program at the International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad.  During Google’s Summer of Code, he worked with Sakai on a collaboration and courseware management platform.

The specific project’s quite interesting.  Agrawal explained that it "will enable users to edit web-pages inline," or in other words, it "will allow users to modify web-pages from client side while they are viewing it."  You can’t get more user-friendly than that, and a lot of applications seem possible.

Agrawal also picked up a lot while working on it.  He wrote, "I learnt how an open-source product is developed step-by-step, how people help each other out, how they manage to be in sync despite being geographically distant, how tasks are planned and executed, how issues are resolved; and the tools which help in managing all these processes. . . .  And above all this, I learnt how to work collaboratively."

As for the Summer of Code program as a whole, Agrawal came away equally impressed.  He wrote, "SoC exposes you to the indispensable open-source communities which are doing tremendous useful work."  Plus, "Students who successfully complete GSoC definitely have an edge over others during interviews for jobs.  It makes a significant contribution to the resume."

The Summer of Code is, in case you didn’t know, a program Google runs to bring young people into contact with free and open source projects.  Accepted students are given a choice between many different projects (there were 150 options this year), along with mentors and stipends.

This presents them with the opportunity to pick up coding skills, forge professional connections, and make a little cash.  It’s a very good deal for which many people compete.

And that brings us back to this year’s record-high success rate.  As a post on the Official Google Blog acknowledges, "85 percent of our student participants have successfully completed their projects."  That number hasn’t been higher than 83 percent in the past.

Leslie Hawthorn, the Summer of Code Program Manager, then continued, "We’d like to congratulate all of our student participants for their hard work and tremendous achievements this summer.  We’re excited to hear that many of our students have planned out the next few months of their coding work with their chosen open source project."

At the very least, participants will get t-shirts, figurative gold stars on their resumes, and $4,500 in their bank accounts.  At the most, well, some direct job offers are likely to result.

As for what Google Summer of Code is, a post on the Google Code blog explains that it’s "our global program to introduce university students to the wonderful world of Open Source development.  For our fifth Summer of Code, students can choose from 150 Free and Open Source software projects, in technical areas as diverse as gaming to humanitarian efforts to operating system design.  All accepted students will be paired with a mentor from academia or industry and will receive coaching in all aspects of software development over the course of their three month coding project."

Since the suggestions appeared on his personal blog, neither he nor we can guarantee supporting them will get you any special attention.  Some are quite interesting, though, and the first one seemed especially applicable.

Cutts writes, "Synergy is a fantastic way to control multiple computers with one mouse/keyboard.  You can even move your mouse directly from one computer’s display seamlessly to the other computer’s display.  But Synergy currently doesn’t support drag/drop between computers or file transfer between computers.  Adding drag/drop sounds like a great summer project to me."

Matt Cutts Suggests Summer Of Code Projects

Why?  Well, if you have to ask, we’d suggest you take a not-so-close look around the Googleplex.  The vast majority of employees use paired monitors. 

As his fifth idea, Cutts later proposed that someone "[e]xtend Firefox 3 Places to provide more complete tab history: when a tab was closed, whether a page was opened in a new tab or a new window, and basically anything to let a user see a ‘watertight’ view of their surfing."  More info is always good, especially when you’re trying to track down that interesting page you saw six days ago and now can’t remember.

One last idea – we won’t elaborate on all 21 – is the concept of "[a] simple tool to backup your entire Google account (email, calendar, docs, feeds, etc.)."  The key here would be "simple," but we think such a tool would be pretty nifty.

Students, mentors, or anyone who would like to influence the Summer of Code should at least give these things some consideration.

It seems that the program is surprisingly popular.  Both Google and Ask, for example, readily complete the phrase "summer of" with the word "code."  Ask even ranks "code" above "Sam" and "love."  So never mind sunshine or sand – here we go with software.

Leslie Hawthorn (Photo Credit: Blogger.com)

On the Official Google Blog, Leslie Hawthorn provides a bit of the project’s history by writing, "In the past three years, we’ve seen more than 1500 students ‘graduate’ from this program, working with 2000+ mentors across 90 countries to produce millions of lines of code.  We’re pleased to have funded more than $10M in open source development through Summer of Code, and we’ve increased our funding for it this year by another $1M."

As for the upcoming event, she continues, "We’re accepting applications from open source projects who’d like to act as mentoring organizations through March 13th, and will begin taking student applications on March 24th.  If you’re interested in learning more, just subscribe to the program discussion list."

To each his (or her) own, etc., etc.  Yet to once again point out the sort of decision you’re making: after browsing the list for a few minutes, we didn’t see any mention of Cancun or The Beach Boys.

“As part of the GSoC mid-term evaluations, we asked our mentors to give us a review of everything from their students’ progress to date to their favorite color,” Leslie Hawthorn of Google wrote at the Google Code Updates blog.

They did as requested, and provided some insight into the second summer of Google’s warm-weather program that matches programmers with mentors in a variety of organizations. For one thing, Hawthorn noted that the mentors seem to overwhelmingly prefer the color blue in a variety of hues.

On the project side, 1,260 mentors oversee 630 students from 456 schools in 90 countries. 102 open source organizations are participating in the Summer of Code.

The GPL has been the license of choice for a lot of the project creators. 48 percent of projects selected the GPL, while 13.7 percent tabbed the New BSD License.

Google picked up 370 applications, which included those they considered as submitted to an “other” category. KDE received the next highest total, followed by Ubuntu & Bazaar, and Python.

The projects students undertake for their organizational sponsors range from UI work to attacking bugs. For example, the group behind the FreeBSD operating system has a number of students working for its during the Summer of Code.

Gbor Kvesdn from Hungary has been working on cleaning up a number of issues with the FreeBSD Ports collection. Clement Lecigne is crafting fixes for Ipv6 stack vulnerabilities in FreeBSD.

Only five percent of those accepted into the program dropped out by the midterm. The remainder will hang on to collect the full stipend of $4500 Google pays to participating students.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.

Google will follow up 2005′s successful Summer of Code project with another session this year. The 2006 version contains projects from 101 mentoring organizations, and 630 aspiring coders will forgo some of their time in the Big Blue Room this summer in favor of the warmth of overclocked processors.

Last year, Google attracted over 400 students to the program with hopes of exceeding that this year. They did so, and those students will be rewarded for their progress and completion of their projects. Students receive $4500 over the course of the program, while the sponsoring organization receives $500.

The list of organizations contains some of the most notable and respected open source projects in the world. Techies who have a non-Windows machine running somewhere most likely have several of these projects on those machines.

Google posted the announcement of the start of the Summer of Code project, and congratulated those accepted to the program. They also made note of a positive development with the program, after the selection process finished:

Some of the projects coders will develop through the summer should have an impact on a few open source products known outside the dedicated world of technology.

Thunderbird – the email client developed by the Mozilla Foundation as an alternative to Microsoft Outlook has one student working on a project to improve the spam filters in the software.

Perl – the highly useful language will have a student develop a way to parse Perl 5 into Perl 6 output; “benevolent Perl dictator for life” Larry Wall will mentor this project.

Google – the program sponsor also mentors a few projects. The company’s open source leader, Chris DiBona, will mentor the self-explanatory “Automated Lexical Disambiguation in Machine Translation with Latent Semantic Analysis” project.

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Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects over a three-month period. The inaugural instance of the program, which took place last summer, brought together 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations from 49 countries. The Python Software Foundation (PSF) will again act as a sponsoring organization in Google’s Summer of Code, matching mentors and projects benefiting Python and Python users.

Projects can include work on the core Python language, programmer utilities, libraries, packages, frameworks related to Python, or other Python implementations like Jython, PyPy, or IronPython. Mentoring instructions are available via this Wiki- Feel free to ask questions on python-dev@python.org. Information From Google on the summer of code project can be found here

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Last year, over 400 students participated, and there was reportedly a huge amount of applications for the stipends and the opportunity to work with some great organizations.

This year, mentoring organizations include Apache, Creative Commons, Gaim, Jabber, PHP, Wikimedia, and Google itself. There are already some ideas to choose from, if you’re not the creative type.

From the FAQ:

Google will provide a stipend of 5000 USD per accepted student developer, of which 4500 USD goes to the student and 500 USD goes to the mentoring organization. Youll be paid 500 USD upon acceptance of your application to the program, 2000 USD mid-program (assuming you’ve made sufficient progress on your project), and 2000 USD at close of program (assuming you’ve completed your project.) The mentoring organization will receive its share upon completion of the project.

Applications open on May 1, and are due by May 8. Google will anounce the accepted proposals on May 23, and developers have until August 21 to complete their projects. And, most importantly, everyone gets a free t-shirt.
(via TechTics > Digg)

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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