One of the most important goals of Google Summer of Code is to give students the experience of working in an open source environment and encourage them to stay involved even after the program concludes. A meaningful value to measure future commitment is the number of recurring students who decide to take up another challenge and participate in the program again. We see returning students who decide to take up another challenge and participate in the program multiple times as a healthy sign of future commitment and engagement in the open source community. This year we proudly welcome 176 “sophomores", approximately 14.5% of students, participating in their second Google Summer of Code.
Below is a detailed table showing how many students have taken part in previous editions of the program.
Student 2009
|
Student 2010
|
Student 2011
|
Student 2012
|
Total Number of Students
|
X
|
X
|
152
| ||
X
|
X
|
19
| ||
X
|
X
|
5
| ||
X
|
X
|
X
|
33
| |
X
|
X
|
X
|
4
| |
X
|
X
|
X
|
4
| |
X
|
X
|
X
|
X
|
7
|
As you can see, there are more than 40 veterans who have participated in three of the last four years. Seven other students have spent every summer since 2009 writing code for their amazing Google Summer of Code projects.
Now let’s investigate how multi-year students migrate between organizations over the years. Let us take into consideration only the students who have participated in the program at least three times. Over 75% of these serial Google Summer of Coders have worked with only one or two different organizations, while exactly one third of them have worked with just one. There are even two students who have been with us for the last four years and have always been accepted by the same organization - one with Samba and one with OpenICC. The table below presents more details.
| 3rd Time Students | 4th Time Students | |
| 1 organization | 14 | 2 |
| 2 organizations | 19 | 2 |
| 3 organizations | 8 | 2 |
| 4 organizations | 1 |
These figures show that the engagement rate among our recurring students is high which translates to more dedicated and enthusiastic developers. We give a big thanks to all the mentors and administrators who put such a great deal of effort into the program each year. It is your hard work and commitment to the students and your projects that encourage the students to apply again!
Stay tuned for another post in the coming weeks regarding the student to mentor transition and other fun numbers for this year's Google Summer of Code.
By Daniel Hans, Google engineer and Melange core contributor
