Mentors are the bread and butter of our program - without their hard work and dedication, there would be no
Google Summer of Code (GSoC). These volunteers spend 12 weeks (plus a month of
community bonding) tirelessly guiding their students to create the best quality project possible and welcoming them into their communities - answering questions and providing help at all hours.
Each year we pore over oodles of data to extract the most interesting and relevant statistics about the GSoC mentors. Here’s a quick snapshot of our 2017 group:
- Total mentors: 3,439
- Mentors assigned to an active project: 1,647
- Mentors who have participated in GSoC over 10 years: 22
- Percentage of new mentors: 49%
GSoC 2017 mentors are a worldly group, hailing from 69 countries on 6 continents - we’re still waiting on a mentor from Antarctica… Anyone?
Some interesting factoids about our mentors:
- Average age: 39
- Youngest: 15*
- Oldest: 68
- Most common first name: Michael (there are 40!)
GSoC mentors help to introduce the next generation to the world of open source software development — for that we are very grateful. To show our appreciation, we invite two mentors from each of the 201
participating organizations to attend the
annual mentor summit at the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California. It’s three days of food, community building, lively debate and lots of fun.
Thank you to everyone involved in Google Summer of Code. Cheers to yet another great year!
By Mary Radomile, Google Open Source
* Say what? 15 years old!? Yep! We had 12 GSoC mentors under the age of 18. This group of enthusiastic teens started their journey in our sister program,
Google Code-in, an open source coding competition for 13-17 year olds. You can read more about it at
g.co/gci.
