Meet Your Mentors
Monday, March 17, 2008
We've just announced the list of accepted mentoring organizations for Google Summer of Code™ 2008, and you can check out more details for each of them on the program home page. After reviewing over 500 applications, we finally narrowed our selection to 175 Free and Open Source projects. Originally, we had planned to work with 150 projects this year, but due to the overwhelming quality of the applications we received we chose to take on an additional 25.
We had to make some very tough decisions this year, as we simply aren't able to accept every great project that applied. We want to thank everyone for their applications and would encourage those of you who were not accepted to apply for future instances of the program.
What Happens Now?
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.
Most organizations have provided individual points of contact for each project suggestion, and you can always propose ideas and look for guidance on project mailing lists or forums, as well as on IRC. You can also look for your potential mentors in the program IRC channel, #gsoc on Freenode.
Remember, some of our most successful student projects come from ideas suggested by the students themselves, so take advantage of this time to explore what areas of development most excite you. You can then find people to help you brainstorm about your initial thoughts and further refine them. We're hoping this additional time for up-front dialogue will help our student applicants craft the most well-informed and targeted program applications possible.
Congratulations to all of our future mentors! We look forward to working with all of you this year, and to working with many of you once again.
