Google Summer of Code

The Google Summer of Code is an annual program first held during the northern hemisphere summer of 2005 in which Google awarded cash prizes to students who successfully completed an open-source coding project during the summer. The event draws its name from the 1967 Summer of Love.

Overview

The program invites students who meet their eligibility criteria to post applications that detail the project they wish to perform. These applications are then evaluated by the corresponding mentoring organization. Every participating organization must provide mentors for each of the project ideas received, if the organization is of the opinion that the project would benefit them. The mentors then rank the applications and submit the ranked list to Google. Google then decides how many projects each organization gets, and selects the top-n applications for that organisation, where n is the number of projects assigned to them.

In the event of a single student being present in the top-n of more than one organization, Google mediates between all the involved organizations and decides who "gets" that student. The slots freed up on the other mentoring organization are passed to the next-best ranked application in that pile.

History

In 2005, more than 8,000 project proposals were submitted for the 200 available student positions. Due to the overwhelming response, Google expanded the program to 419 positions.

The mentoring organizations were responsible for reviewing and selecting proposals, and then providing guidance to those students to help them complete their proposal. Students that successfully completed their proposal to the satisfaction of their mentoring organization were awarded $4500 and a Google Summer of Code T-shirt, while $500 per project was sent to the mentoring organization. Approximately 80% of the projects were successfully completed in 2005.

For the first Summer of Code, Google was criticized for not giving sufficient time to open source organizations so they could plan projects for the Summer of Code. Despite these criticisms there were 39 organizations involved, including FreeBSD, Apache, Ubuntu, Blender, Mozdev, and several others including Google itself.

Also, a majority of the projects initiated by participants at the 2005 SoC stalled immediately afterward. According to a blog post by Chris DiBona, Google's open source program manager, "something like 30 percent of the students stuck with their groups post SoC of Code." Mozilla developer Gervase Markham also commented that none of the 10 Google-sponsored Mozilla projects survived after the event. However, the GAIM project was able to enlist enough coding support through the event to include the changes into GAIM v.2.0; the Jabber Software Foundation and KDE project also counted a few surviving projects of their own from the event (KDE only counted 1 continuing project from out of the 24 projects which it sponsored).

Current

In 2006, around 6000 applications were submitted, less than last year due the fact that in 2006, all applicants were required to have Google Accounts, thereby reducing the amount of spam that got in. Google and most mentors are also of the opinion that the proposals were of much higher quality than 2005's applications. Also, the number of participating organizations almost tripled to 102. In addition to the organizations that participated last year, organisations such as GNU, Gentoo, Adium and PHP are part of this years program. Google has decided to sponsor around 600 projects this time.

The student application deadline was extended until May 9, 2006, at 11:00 PDT. Although the results were to be declared by 5:00 PM PDT, there was considerable delay in publishing it as Google had not expected several students to be selected in more than one organisation. Google allows one student to undertake only one project as part of the program. It took Google several hours to resolve the "dupes" (a term used by the Google staff to indicate a student who had been accepted by more than one organization). The acceptance letters were sent out on May 24, at 3:13 AM PDT, but the letters were also sent out to some 1,600 applicants who had in fact, not been accepted by Google's SoC committee. At 3:38 AM PDT, Chris DiBona posted an apology to the official mailing list, adding that "We're very deeply sorry for this. If you received two e-mails, one that said you were accepted and one that you were not, this means you were not."

Google has released a final list of projects accepted into the program on the SoC website. The proposals themselves were visible to the public for a few hours, after which they were taken down in response to complaints by the participants about the "sensitive and private" information that their applications contained. However, Google has since resolved these issues by allowing each student involved in Summer of Code to provide a brief abstract message that is publically viewable and completely separate from the content of the actual proposal that was submitted to Google.

All students have now been matched to their mentors and have made a start on their respective projects. The program will end on August 21, 2006; with a mid term evaluation due on July 1, 2006. Google will also give the open source comunity an update on the status of the Summer of Code during OSCON, 2006.

External links

Google

Google Summer of Code | Google Summer of Code | Google Summer of Code | Google Summer of Code

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Google Summer of Code

Overview

History

Current

External links