For 19 years, Google Summer of Code has thrived due to the enthusiasm of our open source communities and the 19k+ volunteer mentors that spend from 50-150 hours mentoring each of our 20k contributors since 2005! This year, there are 168 mentoring organizations and over 1,950 mentors participating in the 2023 program. A sincere thank you to our mentors and organization administrators for guiding and supporting our contributors this year. We are also looking forward to hosting many of the 2023 GSoC Mentors on campus this fall for the annual Mentor Summit.
September 4th concluded the standard 12-week project timeline and we are pleased to announce that 628 contributors have successfully completed this year’s program as of today, September 5th, 2023. Congratulations to all the contributors and mentors that have wrapped up their summer coding projects!
2023 has shown us that GSoC continues to grow in popularity with students and developers 19 years after the program began. GSoC had a record high 5,679 contributor applicants from 106 countries submit their project proposals this year. We also had huge interest in the program with over 43,765 registrants from 160 countries applying to the program during the two week application period.
The final step of every GSoC program is to hear back from mentors and contributors on their experiences through evaluations. This helps GSoC Admins continuously improve the program and gives us a chance to see the impact the program has on so many individuals! Some notable results and comments from the standard 12-week project length evaluations are below:
- 95.63% of contributors think that GSoC helped their programming skills
- 99.06% of contributors would recommend their GSoC mentors
- 97.81% of contributors will continue working with their GSoC organization
- 99.84% of contributors plan to continue working on open source
- 82.81% of contributors said they would consider being a mentor
- 96.25% of contributors said they would apply to GSoC again
Here’s some of what our GSoC 2023 Contributors had to say about the program!
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At the suggestion of last year’s contributors, we added multiple live talks throughout the coding period to bring contributors together, providing tips to help them make the most of their GSoC experience. Each of these talks were attended on average by 42% of the 2023 GSoC contributors.
Another request from our previous contributors was to hear more about the cool projects their colleagues did over the summer and the opportunity to talk about their own projects with others. Over the coming weeks we are hosting three lightning talk sessions where over 40 of the 2023 contributors will have the opportunity to present their project learnings to the other contributors and their mentors.
We’ll be back in a couple of months to give a final update on the GSoC projects that will conclude later this year. Almost 30% of contributors (286 contributors) are still completing their projects, so please stay tuned for their results in part two of this blog post later this year!
By Perry Burnham – Google Open Source
