Announcing Google Summer of Code 2020!

Google Open Source is proud to announce Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2020—the 16th year of the program! We look forward to introducing the 16th batch of student developers to the world of open source and matching them with open source projects, while earning a stipend so they can focus their summer on their project.

Over the last 15 years GSoC has provided over 15,000 university students, from 109 countries, with an opportunity to hone their skills by contributing to open source projects during their summer break.

And the ‘special sauce’ that has kept this program thriving for 16 years: the mentorship aspect of the program. Participants gain invaluable experience working directly with mentors who are dedicated members of these open source communities; mentors help bring students into their communities while teaching them, guiding them and helping them find their place in the world of open source.

We’re excited to keep the tradition going! Applications for interested open source project organizations open on January 14, 2020, and student applications open March 25.

Are you an open source project interested in learning more? Visit the program site and read the mentor guide to learn more about what it means to be a mentor organization, how to prepare your community and create appropriate project ideas, and tips for preparing your application. We welcome all types of organizations—large and small—and are very eager to involve first time projects. For 2020, we hope to welcome more organizations into GSoC than ever before and are looking to accept 40-50 new organizations into their first GSoC.

Are you a university student interested in learning how to prepare for the 2020 GSoC program? It’s never too early to start thinking about your proposal or about what type of open source organization you may want to work with. You should read the student guide for important tips on preparing your proposal and what to consider if you wish to apply for the program in mid-March. You can also get inspired by checking out the 200+ organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code 2019, as well as the projects that students worked on.

We encourage you to explore other resources and you can learn more on the program website.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

From "let's try" to "woah, this is awesome!": Three years of GSoC for InterMine

GSoC Experience Series

InterMine is an open source data warehouse for biological data. In 2017, we decided at short-ish notice to participate in a call from Open Genome Informatics for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentoring organisations. InterMine had never participated in a program like this before, and we weren’t entirely sure if the time investment was actually going to be worth it. We nervously said “no more than two projects”, but we had so many great applications, we ended up taking on five brilliant students.

Fast forward to 2019, GSoC is firmly embedded in our organisation it’s hard to imagine that this is only our third time participating. The benefits to us (and hopefully the students as well!) were immeasurable, allowing us to explore open-ended projects we thought might be fun and implement concrete ideas that we’ve been wanting to do for years, all while interacting with a really smart bunch of talented students. 

From the 2017 cohort of students, we ended up with one of our students, Konstantinos Krytsis, authoring a scientific paper about the work they did: InterMineR: an R package for InterMine databases. Another student, Nadia Yudina, returned to our org as a mentor the next year.

In 2018, student engagement got even better: of six students, Adrián Rodríguez-Bazaga applied for an internal vacancy and joined us full time, Nupur Gunwant spent her next summer break working on an internship in our office, and two students returned as mentors the next year (Aman Dwivedi and Arunan Sugunakumar).

By this point, any questions we might have had about whether or not GSoC was “worth it” were firmly answered: GSoC had become an integral part of our team’s operations. There were still things we needed to improve, though—we ran a student debrief after GSoC 2018, and one student expressed that despite having worked with our API and data for three months, they still didn’t have a firm idea of why or how someone might wish to use InterMine. 😱 whoops! This definitely had never been our intent, and I felt mortified that we’d overlooked something so basic.

In 2019, we set out to provide our students with a firm grounding by running cohort calls. All students were invited, giving them the chance to meet one another and interact—not quite face to face, but video calls still give a great sense of “group” compared to just text chat. We structured the calls to run over several months, liberally borrowing from the Mozilla Open Leaders curriculum to teach students about open source good practices, presentation skills, code review, providing effective and kind feedback (an essential part of code review), and of course—talking about what InterMine is, how it was founded, and what type of people might use it. We made heavy use of Zoom’s breakout room feature, to allow small sub-groups of students and mentors to have private discussions about topics, before re-convening to report their experiences to the group.

Feedback from students was very positive about the calls, so we expect to continue this in later years. I think my favourite comment after our very first call was “Are there going to be more of these group calls? This was awesome!” We also repeatedly had the group calls mentioned positively in free-text feedback from student evaluations.

With this in mind, we’d like to share our call agenda templates with other organisations so others can run the same student cohort calls if they wish,and remix/modify, etc. as needed. As part of our GSoC site repo, all content including our call templates, GSoC grading criteria and advice, etc. is Apache licensed and open for reuse. You can see all of our call templates on our GSoC repo site, or fork our GSoC GitHub repo;and I’m happy to discuss ideas (email: yo@intermine.org, twitter: @yoyehudi or @intermineorg) or help others get similar group call programs off the ground if you’d like advice.

Google Summer of Code: Being Happy While Working is Possible

GSoC Experience Series

I am proud to have been part of GSoC 2019, which was without a doubt, a motivating experience that gives strength to continue improving and working in open source. I participated with the project: New rules for the Topology Framework in gvSIG Desktop, and received mentoring by the OSGeo organization and gvSIG association. Being a part of this project has been one of the best experiences I have had—from a professional point of view and because the freedom the mentors gave me to work and the interaction with the community, allowed me to enjoy the environment while learning simultaneously. Achieving the objectives was a challenge but thanks to the motivation and support it was possible.

With the project it was possible to implement a new set of topology rules for the validation and correction of vector data sets, which improve and extend the characteristics of previously existing tools in gvSIG. These tools allow browsing, searching and correcting validation errors. With the rules implementation are automated tasks, allowing to reduce errors and eliminating repetitive tasks. For more information, you can read the final report or the repository with all the documentation of the project documentation is available in English, Spanish and Italian.

What I love about this project is working on time optimization—perhaps the most precious and scarce resource—The user is allowed to focus on logic to be solved, leaving aside repetitive tasks and optimizing the use of time.

Defining rule implementation: “Must be Coincident with”


Rule “Must be Coincident with” working to find the topological errors.

Beyond the technical contribution, what gave me the most value is the spirit of the program that allows you to work professionally, and through a motivating context really allows you to enjoy the process and this enhances the results. It was essential that as the project progressed the mentors were transparent and allowed me to work with more freedom; their trust and the community interaction was of great importance.

It has been a great experience and I appreciate the opportunity to participate in a project with these characteristics, which also helps optimize the use of time. I encourage anyone who is interested in adding value in any area of open source to participate in GSoC, don’t hesitate due to your age.

By Mauro Carlevaro

It Really is a Great Learning Experience

GSoC Experience Series

Nearly a month ago the official results for Google Summer of Code 2019 were announced, and I am happy to say I successfully completed the program with OpenStreetMap working on the 3D renderer OSM2World.

Before even applying, when I was searching for information on it most of the resources I was able to find included the same phrase: "It is a great learning experience!"

Being the almost-graduate Computer Science student I was, I had the inaccurate impression of thinking I knew enough skills and doubted what it could really offer me—in terms of expanding knowledge, as I had decided on a (Java) project I would apply to (a language I already knew).

Long story short, here is what "it is a great learning experience" translated into for me when it came to programming practices:

• Always think about cases besides the "happy path": CS students/learners may agree with me here: Practice-projects do not always require making the application tolerant towards wrong input one can provide. That is not the case for a large scale application, though, as one unpredicted NullPointer exception derived from one tiny part of the input file (in my case) can have a user scratching their head for hours or not find the root of the problem, which in many cases is not where the error log indicates; in addition to their work not being done due to the unexpected crash. Which leads me to the 2nd point that I learned the hard way.
• Make unit testing an integral part of coding routine: Yes, this, as well as other points listed here, might seem obvious to most but until recently, it was not to me. And being known as one of the less interesting tasks to perform when coding definitely doesn't help unit tests place high on programmer's "favorite things to do" lists. However, tests can most of the time detect unintended "features" other than just wrong method output, like the unexpected crashes mentioned above. So it is pretty much always better to create them soon after writing your new method rather than waiting before the end of a deadline.
• Add elements of Functional Programming to object-oriented thinking, with the most important elements to me being those of immutable types and side-effect free methods (i.e. methods that do not modify variable values outside their local environment). I only understood the importance of that myself when I was suddenly able to make use of such methods I wrote for previous tasks, for the latest ones. And that was due to the fact that I was instructed to write them that way, without knowing beforehand they would come in handy again.

This list could probably have a few more points added, it was a 3-month long program after all, but for me those are the ones that definitely deserve their spot here. And of course the above would not have been possible without my mentor's... mentoring! Instructing someone on what to do and allow them to discover the benefits of the advice on their own, in addition to providing any necessary explanations, is definitely a way to help someone adopt practices for a lifetime! It is safe to say that the whole GSoC experience would have been different, should things have been different.

For anyone that might be interested, here is the application document I submitted as well as the final project!

By Jason Manoloudis, OpenStreetMap GSoC Student

Google Summer of Code 2019 (Statistics Part 2)

2019 has been an epic year for Google Summer of Code as we celebrated 15 years of connecting university students from around the globe with 201 open source organizations big and small.

We want to congratulate our 1,134 students that complete GSoC 2019. Great work everyone!

Now that GSoC 2019 is over we would like to wrap up the program with some more statistics to round out the year.

Student Registrations

We had 30,922 students from 148 countries register for GSoC 2019 (that’s a 19.5% increase in registrations over last year, the previous record). Interest in GSoC clearly continues to grow and we’re excited to see it growing in all parts of the world.

For the first time ever we had students register from Bhutan, Fiji, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, South Sudan, and Swaziland.

Universities

The 1,276 students accepted into the GSoC 2019 program hailed from 6586 universities, of which, 164 have students participating for the first time in GSoC.

Schools with the most accepted students for GSoC 2019:

University	# of Accepted Students
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee	48
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	29
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	27
Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University (GGSIPU Dwarka)	20
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur	19
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	19
Amrita University / Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham	14
Delhi Technological University	11
Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay	11
Indraprastha Institute of Information and Technology, New Delhi	11

Mentors

Each year we pore over gobs of data to extract some interesting statistics about the GSoC mentors. Here’s a quick synopsis of our 2019 crew:

• Registered mentors: 2,815
• Mentors with assigned student projects: 2,066
• Mentors who have participated in GSoC for 10 or more years: 70
• Mentors who have been a part of GSoC for 5 years or more: 307
• Mentors that are former GSoC students: 691
• Mentors that have also been involved in the Google Code-in program: 498
• Percentage of new mentors: 35.84%

GSoC 2019 mentors are from all parts of the world, representing 81 countries!

Every year thousands of GSoC mentors help introduce the next generation to the world of open source software development—for that we are forever grateful. We can not stress enough that without our invaluable mentors the GSoC program would not exist. Mentorship is why GSoC has remained strong for 15 years, the relationships built between students and mentors have helped sustain the program and many of these communities. Sharing their passion for open source, our mentors have paved the road for generations of contributors to enter open source development.

Thank you to all of our mentors, organization administrators, and all of the “unofficial” mentors that help in our open source organization’s communities. Google Summer of Code is a community effort and we appreciate each and every one of you.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Unleashing Open Source Silicon

Open Source Silicon

We all know that open source software has changed the fundamental nature of the software industry and that Google generously adds fuel to this culture of openness and community through Google Summer of Code. What few people realize is that there is another major industry that is ripe for an open source overhaul—the silicon industry. And, this summer, a Google Summer of Code student helped open the floodgates.

If you search social media for “open source silicon,” you’ll find a few dozen names that pop up with some frequency. These folks are fanatically driving forward with open source circuit models and software for creating them. You’ll also find people clambering to jump aboard the RISC-V bandwagon. RISC-V, like x86, MIPS, and others before it, is a CPU “instruction set architecture,” and the mere fact that it is free of proprietary licenses has inspired countless open source implementations and an industry shake-up that has ARM quaking in its boots.

While this open source silicon community is a hotbed of enthusiasm, it is several decades behind the world of open source software. In this post, I’ll reveal the three reasons this movement has, thus far, not been able to take off like open source software, and I’ll explain why these three obstacles are all coming to a very sudden and dramatic end, that will unleash a tidal wave, catching the silicon industry by surprise. And you’ll see that Google Summer of Code, this year, played a pivotal role.

What’s Standing in the Way

So, why is coding and sharing circuit models any different from sharing software? Three reasons:

1. Implementation Details: There’s more to worry about with hardware than software. Correct functionality is far from the only concern. Particular care must be given to physical implementation. And this detail must be modified for specific silicon technology and design constraints. As a result, leveraging open source logic can involve a substantial amount of rework.
2. Access to software: While compilers for software tend to be open source, electronic design automation (EDA) tools for compiling hardware are traditionally proprietary and prohibitively expensive.
3. Access to hardware: Unlike software, circuit models must be turned into silicon to be useful. Fabricating custom silicon is out of the question for a hobbyist, but field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) provide a more realistic option. These are chips that can be quickly reconfigured, or “programmed,” to implement any logic function. While FPGAs are within reach, they still cost money, and they are delivered by postal service, not a web browser. And, worst of all, it could take weeks to get an FPGA platform up and running and communicating with the open source logic.

Breaking Down the Barriers

Let’s look at what the open source community is doing to help:

1. Implementation Details: There is a trend toward designing more abstractly, and leaving the details to tools. Open source tools can now compile C++ into silicon (with caveats). And several open source hardware description languages leverage modern software language innovations that make it easier to rework implementation details. The open source community has shown a greater willingness than industry to explore and adopt these languages. Though hardware remains fundamentally different from software, their differences are becoming less prominent.
2. Access to software: Open source EDA software has marked some significant achievements in the past several years. Circuit designs have been implemented on FPGAs using 100% free and open source EDA tools. (Google Summer of Code has helped to fund a few open source EDA capabilities in projects under the Free and Open Source Silicon Foundation.) The US government has recognized the opportunity and is providing significant fuel to the fire through the Posh Open Source Hardware initiative. Being restricted to open source software can still be a bit limiting, but it is no longer prohibitive.
3. Access to hardware: Hmmm. This is still a problem.

My personal contributions to this open source silicon movement stem from my startup, Redwood EDA. We directly target problem #1 by providing tools that support advanced (yet simpler) circuit modeling techniques. And, to address #2, we make all of our software freely available online for open source development. But neither open source EDA nor the efforts of my startup had been able to noticeably impact problem #3, access to hardware.

This is where bigger forces have stepped in. In the past few years, cloud providers have begun incorporating FPGAs into their datacenters. These are available to anyone with an internet connection and a credit card, bundled with industry-class EDA software, on a pay-per-use basis. Wow! This is the solution to hardware access! An open source developer can provide not only their hardware model but also the platform for which their model was designed. A user can download and go, just like they can with software! …in theory.

So here’s the rub. The learning curve for cloud FPGA platforms has been way too high for the open source community to latch on.

Our Project

With a bit of help from Politecnico di Milano’s NECST Lab and ThroughPuter Inc., I was able to get a project off the ground, and it attracted some attention for this year’s Google Summer of Code. I was happy to see an application from Ákos Hadnagy who had done some other ground-breaking work with me in the last Summer of Code, and he was accepted into the program. Together, this summer, we built infrastructure, automated flows, and wrote documentation (or more to the point, eliminated documentation), and now, instead of a month to ramp up, it is now possible to develop for this platform in a matter of minutes!

We dubbed our framework “1st CLaaS,” where we have coined the term “CLaaS” for custom logic as a service. Very simply, 1st CLaaS wraps a developer’s custom FPGA logic as a microservice. Standard web protocols can be used to stream bits to and from this logic, and platform details are hidden by the framework.

Implications and Wrap-up

So there is no longer anything standing in the way! Hobbyists can build and share hardware, and open source silicon can thrive. Just imagine the disruption this will have on the industry, which is currently driven by corporate giants. And with easy web integration, the opportunity and demand for hardware acceleration should rise, and we could start to see some interesting new capabilities on the web that were not imaginable until now.

Google certainly didn’t have this specific industry transformation in mind when starting Google Summer of Code, but I suspect the whole point of the program was to inspire and enable the unexpected. And it did!

If you’d like to contribute to 1st CLaaS or collaborate on some of the world’s first FPGA-accelerated web applications, we’d be more than happy to have you involved. I look forward to next year's applications.

By Steve Hoover, Redwood EDA, Google Summer of Code mentor

Google Code-in 2019 is Right Around the Corner!

This year is the 10th anniversary of the Google Code-in (GCI) contest! Students ages 13–17, globally, can learn about open source development by working on real projects, with mentorship from active developers. GCI begins on December 2, 2019 and runs for seven weeks, ending January 23, 2020.

Google Code-in is unique because students have the autonomy to select what they’re interested in working on from 2,500+ tasks created by open source organizations, all while having mentors available to answer questions as they work on tasks.

There are many questions that developers of any age ask themselves when they initially get involved in open source; from where to start to whether they have the expertise to truly support the organization. The beauty of GCI lies in the participating open source organizations who realize teens are often first time contributors, leading mentors who volunteer to come prepared with the patience and experience to help these newcomers join the open source community.

New contributors bring fresh perspectives, ideas, and enthusiasm into their open source communities, helping them thrive. Throughout the last 9 years, 58 GCI organizations helped 11,000 students from 108 countries make real contributions to open source projects; and to this day many of those students continue to participate in various open source communities and many have become mentors themselves! Some have even gone on to join Google Summer of Code (GSoC).

Contest participants work on a varied level of tasks that require anywhere from beginner to advanced skills in the following five categories:

• Code: writing or refactoring
• Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
• Outreach/Research: community management, marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
• Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality
• Design: graphic design or user interface design

Organizations that are interested in mentoring students, can apply for Google Code-in beginning Thursday, October 10th. Google Code-in starts for students Monday, December 2nd!
Visit the contest site g.co/gci to learn more about the contest and find flyers, slide decks, timelines, and more.

By Radha Jhatakia, Google Open Source

That’s a Wrap for Google Summer of Code 2019

As the 15th year of Google Summer of Code (GSoC) comes to a close, we are pleased to announce that 1,134 students from 61 countries have successfully completed the 2019 program. Congratulations to all of our students and mentors who made this summer’s program so memorable!

Throughout the last 12 weeks, the GSoC students worked eagerly with 201 open source organizations and over 2,000 mentors from 72 countries—learning to work virtually on teams and developing complex pieces of code. The student projects are now public so feel free to take a look at the amazing efforts they put in over the summer.

Many open source communities rely on new perspectives and talent to keep their projects thriving and without student contributions like these, they wouldn’t be able to grow their communities; GSoC students assist in redesigning and enhancing these organizations’ codebases sometimes as first-time contributors not only to the project but to open source! This is just the beginning for GSoC students—many go on to become future mentors and even more become long-term committers and some will start their own open source projects in the years to come

And last but not least, we would like to thank the mentors and organization administrators who make GSoC possible. Their dedication to welcoming new student contributors into their communities is inspiring and vital to grow the open source community. Thank you all!

By Radha Jhatakia, Google Open Source

Accepting student applications for Google Summer of Code 2019

We are now accepting applications from university students who want to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019. Want to hone your software development skills while doing good for the open source community?

This year we are celebrating 15 years of introducing university students from around the world to open source software communities and our passionate community of mentors. For 3three months students code from the comfort of their homes and receive stipends based on thefor successful completion of their project milestones.

Past participants say the real-world experience that GSoC provides sharpened their technical skills, boosted their confidence, expanded their professional network and enhanced their resume.

Interested students can submit proposals on the program site between now and Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at 18:00 UTC.

While many students began preparing in late February when we announced the 200+ participating open source organizations, it’s not too late for you to start! The first step is to browse the list of organizations and look for project ideas that appeal to you. Next, reach out to the organization to introduce yourself and determine if your skills and interests are a good fit. Since spots are limited, we recommend writing a strong proposal and submitting a draft early so you can get feedback from the organization and increase the odds of being selected.

You can learn more about how to prepare by watching the video below and checking out the Student Guide and Advice for Students.

You can find more information on our website, including a full timeline of important dates. We also highly recommend reviewing the FAQ and Program Rules.

Remember to submit your proposals early as you only have until Tuesday, April 9 at 18:00 UTC. Good luck to all who apply!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

And the Google Summer of Code 2019 mentor organizations are...

We are excited to announce the open source projects and organizations that have been accepted for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019, the 15th year of the program! As usual, we received more applications this year than we did last year, about twice as many as we are able to accept into the program.

After careful review, we have chosen 207 open source projects to be mentor organizations this year, 28 of which are new to the program. Please see the program website for a complete list of the accepted organizations.

Are you a student interested in participating? We begin accepting student applications on Monday, March 25, 2019 at 18:00 UTC and the deadline to apply is Tuesday, April 9, 2019 at 18:00 UTC.

The most successful applications come from students who start preparing now. You can start by watching the short video below, checking out the Student Guide, and reviewing the list of accepted organizations and reaching out to the 2 or 3 that interest you the most now - before the application period begins.

You can find more information on our website, including a full timeline of important dates. We also highly recommend perusing the FAQ and Program Rules and watching the short videos with more details about GSoC for students and mentors.

A hearty congratulations–and thank you–to all of our mentor organizations! We look forward to working with all of you during Google Summer of Code 2019.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Seeking open source projects for Google Summer of Code 2019

Do you lead or represent a free or open source software organization? Are you seeking new contributors? (Who isn’t?) Do you enjoy the challenge and reward of mentoring new developers? Apply to be a mentor organization for Google Summer of Code 2019!

We are searching for open source projects and organizations to participate in the 15th annual Google Summer of Code (GSoC). GSoC is a global program that draws university student developers from around the world to contribute to open source. Each student spends three months working on a coding project, with the support of volunteer mentors, for participating open source organizations from late May to August.

Last year 1,264 students worked with 206 open source organizations. Organizations include individual smaller and medium sized open source projects as well as a number of umbrella organizations with many sub-projects under them (Python Software Foundation, CERN, Apache Software Foundation).

You can apply to be a mentoring organization for GSoC starting today. The deadline to apply is February 6 at 20:00 UTC. Organizations chosen for GSoC 2019 will be publicly announced on February 26.

Please visit the program site for more information on how to apply and review the detailed timeline of important deadlines. We also encourage you to check out the Mentor Guide and our short video on why open source projects choose to apply to be a part of the program.

Best of luck to all of the project applicants!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Summer of Code: 15 years strong!

Google Open Source is proud to announce Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2019 – the 15th year of the program! We look forward to introducing the 15th batch of student developers to the world of open source and matching them with open source projects.

Over the last 14 years GSoC has provided over 14,000 university students from 109 countries with an opportunity to hone their skills by contributing to open source projects during their summer break. Participants gain invaluable experience working directly with mentors on open source projects, and earn a stipend upon successful completion of their project.

We’re excited to keep the tradition going! Applications for interested open source project organizations open on January 15, 2019, and student applications open March 25.

Are you an open source project interested in learning more? Visit the program site and read the mentor guide to learn more about what it means to be a mentor organization and how to prepare your community and your application. We welcome all types of organizations – large and small – and are eager to involve first time projects. Each year, about 20% of the organizations we accept are completely new to GSoC.

Are you a university student keen on learning about how to prepare for the 2019 GSoC program? It’s never too early to start thinking about your proposal or about what type of open source organization you may want to work with. You should read the student guide for important tips on preparing your proposal and what to consider if you wish to apply for the program in March. You can also get inspired by checking out the 200+ organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code 2018 as well as the projects that students worked on.

We encourage you to explore other resources and you can learn more on the program website.

By Stephanie Taylor, GSoC Program Lead

That’s a wrap for Google Summer of Code 2018

We are pleased to announce that 1,072 students from 59 countries have successfully completed the 2018 Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Congratulations to all of our students and mentors who made this our biggest and best Google Summer of Code yet.

Over the past 12 weeks, GSoC students have worked diligently with 212 open source organizations and over 2,100 mentors from all around the world, learning to work with distributed teams and developing complex pieces of code. Student projects are now public – take a closer look at their work.

Open source communities need new ideas to keep projects thriving and evolving; GSoC students bring fresh perspectives while helping organizations enhance, extend, and refine their codebases. This is not the end of the road for GSoC students! Many will go on to become mentors in future years and many more will become long-term committers.

And finally, a big thank you to the mentors and organization administrators who make GSoC possible. Their dedication to welcoming new student contributors into their communities is awesome and inspiring. Thank you all!

By Mary Radomile, Google Open Source

Magnificent mentors of Google Summer of Code 2018

Mentors are the heart and soul of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and have been for the last 14 years. Without their hard work and dedication, there would be no Google Summer of Code. These volunteers spend 4+ months guiding their students to create the best quality project possible while welcoming them into their communities – answering questions and providing help at all hours of the day, including weekends and holidays.

Thank you mentors and organization administrators! 

Each year we pore over heaps of data to extract some interesting statistics about the GSoC mentors. Here’s a quick synopsis of our 2018 crew:

• Registered mentors: 2,819
• Mentors with assigned student projects: 1,996
• Mentors who have participated in GSoC for 10 or more years: 46
• Mentors who have been a part of GSoC for 5 years or more: 272
• Mentors that are former GSoC students: 627
• Mentors that have also been involved in the Google Code-in program: 474
• Percentage of new mentors: 36.5%

GSoC 2018 mentors are from all parts of the world, hailing from 75 countries!

If you want to see the stats for all 75 countries check out this list.

Another fun fact about our 2018 mentors: they range in age from 15-80 years old!

• Average mentor age: 34
• Median mentor age: 33
• Mentors under 18 years old: 26*

GSoC mentors help 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 206 participating organizations to attend our annual mentor summit at the Google campus in Sunnyvale, California. It’s three days of community building, lively debate, learning best practices from one another, working to strengthen open source communities, good food, and lots and lots of chocolate.

Thank you to all of our mentors, organization administrators, and all of the “unofficial” mentors that help in the various open source organization’s communities. Google Summer of Code is a community effort and we appreciate each and every one of you.

Cheers to yet another great year!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

* Most of these 26 young GSoC mentors started their journey in Google Code-in, our contest for 13-17 year olds that introduces young students to open source software development.

Google Summer of Code 2018 statistics part 2

Now that Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2018 is underway and students are wrapping up their first month of coding, we wanted to bring you some more statistics on the 2018 program. Lots and lots of numbers follow:

Organizations

Students are working with 206 organizations (the most we’ve ever had!), 41 of which are participating in GSoC for the first time.

Student Registrations

25,873 students from 147 countries registered for the program, which is a 25.3% increase over the previous high for the program back in 2017. There are 9 new countries with students registering for the first time: Angola, Bahamas, Burundi, Cape Verde, Chad, Equatorial Guinea, Kosovo, Maldives, and Mali.

Project Proposals

5,199 students from 101 countries submitted a total of 7,209 project proposals. 70.5% of the students submitted 1 proposal, 18.1% submitted 2 proposals, and 11.4% submitted 3 proposals (the max allowed).

Gender Breakdown

11.63% of accepted students are women. We are always working toward making our programs and open source more inclusive, and we collaborate with organizations and communities that help us improve every year.

Universities

The 1,268 students accepted into the GSoC 2018 program hailed from 613 universities, of which 216 have students participating for the first time in GSoC.

Schools with the most accepted students for GSoC 2018:

University	Country	Students
Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee	India	35
International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad	India	32
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani (BITS Pilani)	India	23
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur	India	22
Birla Institute of Technology and Science Pilani, Goa campus / BITS-Pilani - K.K.Birla Goa Campus	India	18
Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur	India	16
University of Moratuwa	Sri Lanka	16
Indian Institute of Technology, Patna	India	14
Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham	India	13
Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi	India	11
Indraprastha Institute of Information and Technology, New Dehli	India	11
University of Buea	Cameroon	11
BITS Pilani, Hyderabad Campus	India	11

Another post with stats on our awesome GSoC mentors will be coming soon!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Summer of Code 2018 statistics part 1

Since 2005, Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has been bringing new developers into the open source community every year. This year we accepted 1,264 students from 62 countries into the 2018 GSoC program to work with a record 206 open source organizations this summer.

Students are currently participating in the Community Bonding phase of the program where they become familiar with the open source projects they will be working with. They also spend time learning the codebase and the community’s best practices so they can start their 12 week coding projects on May 14th.

Each year we like to share program statistics about the GSoC program and the accepted students and mentors involved in the program. Here are a few stats:

• 88.2% of the accepted students are participating in their first GSoC
• 74.4% of the students are first time applicants

Degrees

• 76.18% of accepted students are undergraduates, 17.5% are masters students, and 6.3% are getting their PhDs.
• 73% are Computer Science majors, 4.2% are mathematics majors, 17% are other engineering majors (electrical, mechanical, aerospace, etc.)
• We have students in a variety of majors including neuroscience, linguistics, typography, and music technologies.

Countries

This year there are four students that are the first to be accepted into GSoC from their home countries of Kosovo (three students) and Senegal. A complete list of accepted students and their countries is below:

Country	Students		Country	Students		Country	Students
Argentina	5		Hungary	7		Russian Federation	35
Australia	10		India	605		Senegal	1
Austria	14		Indonesia	3		Serbia	1
Bangladesh	3		Ireland	1		Singapore	8
Belarus	3		Israel	2		Slovak Republic	2
Belgium	3		Italy	24		South Africa	1
Brazil	19		Japan	7		South Korea	2
Bulgaria	2		Kosovo	3		Spain	21
Cameroon	14		Latvia	1		Sri Lanka	41
Canada	31		Lithuania	5		Sweden	6
China	52		Malaysia	2		Switzerland	5
Croatia	3		Mauritius	1		Taiwan	3
Czech Republic	4		Mexico	4		Trinidad and Tobago	1
Denmark	1		Morocco	2		Turkey	8
Ecuador	4		Nepal	1		Uganda	1
Egypt	12		Netherlands	6		Ukraine	6
Finland	3		Nigeria	6		United Kingdom	28
France	22		Pakistan	5		United States	104
Germany	53		Poland	3		Venezuela	1
Greece	16		Portugal	10		Vietnam	4
Hong Kong	3		Romania	10

There were a record number of students submitting proposals for the program this year -- 5,199 students from 101 countries.

In our next GSoC statistics post we will delve deeper into the schools, gender breakdown, mentors, and registration numbers for the 2018 program.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Rolling out the red carpet for GSoC 2018 students!

Congratulations to our 2018 Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students and a big thank you to everyone who applied! Our 206 mentoring organizations have chosen the 1,264 students that they'll be working with during the 14th Google Summer of Code. This year’s students come from 64 different countries!

The next step for participating students is the Community Bonding period which runs from April 23rd through May 15th. During this time, students will get up to speed on the culture and code base of their new community. They’ll also get acquainted with their mentor(s) and learn more about the languages or tools they will need to complete their projects. Coding begins May 15th and will continue throughout the summer until August 14th.

To the more than 3,800 students who were not chosen this year - don’t be discouraged! Many students apply at least once to GSoC before being accepted. You can improve your odds for next time by contributing to the open source project of your choice directly; organizations are always eager for new contributors! Look around GitHub and elsewhere on the internet for a project that interests you and get started.

Happy coding, everyone!

By Stephanie Taylor, GSoC Program Lead

A galactic experience in Google Code-in 2017

This is a guest post from Liquid Galaxy, one of the organizations that participated in both Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in 2017.

Liquid Galaxy, an open source project that powers panoramic views spanning multiple computers and displays, has been participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) since 2011. However, we never applied to participate in Google Code-in (GCI) because we heard stories from other projects about long hours and interrupted holidays in service of mentoring eager young students.

That changed in 2017! And, while the stories are true, we have to say it’s also an amazing and worthwhile experience.

It was hard for our small project to recruit the number of mentors needed. Thankfully, our GSoC mentors stepped up, as did many former GSoC students. We even had forward thinking students who were interested in participating in GSoC 2018 volunteer to mentor! While it was challenging, our team of mentors helped us have a nearly flawless GCI experience.

The Google Open Source team only had to nudge us once, when a student’s task had been pending review for more than 36 hours. We’re pretty happy with that considering we had nearly 500 tasks completed over the 50 days of the contest.

More important than our experience, though, is the student experience. We learned a lot, seeing how they chose tasks, the attention to detail some of them put into their work, and the level of interaction between the students and the mentors. Considering these were young students, ranging in age from 13 to 17, they far exceeded our expectations.

There was one piece of advice the Google Open Source team gave us that we didn’t understand as GCI newbies: have a large number of tasks ready from day one, and leave some unpublished until the halfway point. That ended up being key, it ensured we had enough tasks for the initial flood of students and some in reserve for the second flood around the holidays. Our team of mentors worked hard from the moment we were accepted into GCI to the moment we began to create over 150 tasks in five different categories. Students seemed to think we did a good job and told us they enjoyed the variety of tasks and level of difficulty.

We’re glad we finally participated in Google Code-in and we’ll definitely be applying next time! You can learn more about the project and the students who worked with us on our blog.

By Andreu Ibáñez, Liquid Galaxy org admin

Celebrating open source mentorship with Joomla

Let’s marvel for a moment: as Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2018 begins, 46 of the participating open source organizations are celebrating a decade or more with the program. There are 586 collective years of mentorship between them, and that’s just through GSoC.

Free and open source software projects have been doing outreach and community building since the beginning. The free software movement has been around for 35 years, and open source has been around for 20.

Bringing new people into open source is necessary for project health and sustainability, but it’s not easy. It takes time and effort to prepare onboarding materials and mentor people. It takes personal dedication, a welcoming culture, and a commitment to institutional knowledge. Sustained volunteerism at this scale is worthy of celebration!

Joomla is one open source project that exemplifies this and Puneet Kala is one such person. Joomla, a web content management system (CMS) that was first released in 2005, is now on their 11th year of GSoC. More than 80 students have participated over the years. Most students are still actively contributing, and many have gone on to become mentors.

Puneet, now Joomla’s GSoC team lead, began with the project as a student five years ago. He sent along this article celebrating their 10th anniversary, which includes links to interviews with other students who have become mentors, and this panel discussion from Joomla World Conference.

It’s always great to hear from the people who have participated in Google Summer of Code. The stories are inspiring and educational. They know a thing or two about building open source communities, so we share what they have to say: you can find guest posts here.

We’d like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the 608 open source organizations and 12,000 organization administrators and mentors who have been a part of GSoC so far. We’d also like to applaud the 46 organizations that have 10+ years under their belts!

Your tireless investment in the future of people and open source is a testament to generosity.

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Coding your way into cinemas

This is a guest post from apertus° and TimVideos.us, open source organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code last year and are back for 2018!

The apertus° AXIOM project is bringing the world’s first open hardware/free software digital motion picture production camera to life. The project has a rich history, exercises a steadfast adherence to the open source ethos, and all aspects of development have always revolved around supporting and utilising free technologies. The challenge of building a sophisticated digital cinema camera was perfect for Google Summer of Code 2017. But let’s start at the beginning: why did the team behind the project embark on their journey?

Modern Cinematography

For over a century film was dominated by analog cameras and celluloid, but in the late 2000’s things changed radically with the adoption of digital projection in cinemas. It was a natural next step, then, for filmmakers to shoot and produce films digitally. Certain applications in science, large format photography and fine arts still hold onto 35mm film processing, but the reduction in costs and improved workflows associated with digital image capture have revolutionised how we create and consume visual content.

The DSLR revolution

Photo by Matthew Pearce
licensed CC SA 2.0.

Filmmaking has long been considered an expensive discipline accessible only to a select few. This all changed with the adoption of movie recording capabilities in digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) cameras. For multinational corporations this “new” feature was a relatively straightforward addition to existing models as most compact digital photo cameras could already record video clips. This was the first time that a large diameter image sensor, a vital component for creating the typical shallow depth of field we consider cinematic, appeared in consumer cameras. In recent times, user groups have stepped up to contribute to the DSLR revolution first-hand, including groups like the Magic Lantern community.

Magic Lantern

Photo by Dave Dugdale licensed CC BY-SA 2.0.

Magic Lantern is a free and open source software add-on that runs from a camera’s SD/CF card. It adds a host of new features to Canon’s DSLRs that weren't included from the factory, such as allowing users to record high-dynamic range (HDR) video or 14-bit uncompressed RAW video. It’s a community project and many filmmakers simply wouldn’t have bought a Canon camera if it weren’t for the features that Magic Lantern pioneered. Because installing Magic Lantern doesn’t replace the stock Canon firmware or modify the read-only memory (ROM) but runs alongside it, it is both easy to remove and carries little risk. Originally developed for filmmaking, Magic Lantern’s feature base has expanded to include tools useful for still photography as well.

Starting the revolution for real 

Of course, Magic Lantern has been held back by the underlying proprietary hardware routines on existing camera models. So, in 2014 a team of developers and filmmakers around the apertus° project joined forces with the Magic Lantern team to lay the foundation for a totally independent, open hardware, free software, digital cinema camera. They ran a successful crowdfunding campaign for initial development, and they completed hardware development of the first developer kits in 2016. Unlike traditional cameras, the AXIOM is designed to be completely modular, and so continuously evolve, thereby preventing it from ever becoming obsolete. How the camera evolves is determined by its user community, with its design files and source code freely available and users encouraged to duplicate, modify and redistribute anything and everything related to the camera.

While the camera is primarily for use in motion picture production, there are many suitable applications where AXIOM can be useful. Individuals in science, astronomy, medicine, aerial mapping, industrial automation, and those who record events or talks at conferences have expressed interest in the camera. A modular and open source device for digital imaging allows users to build a system that meets their unique requirements. One such company for instance, Mavrx Inc, who use aerial imagery to provide actionable insight for the agriculture industry, used the camera because it enabled them to not only process the data more efficiently than comparable camera equivalents, but also to re-configure its form factor so that it could be installed alongside existing equipment configurations.

Google Summer of Code 2017

Continuing their journey, apertus° participated in Google Summer of Code for the first time in 2017. They received about 30 applications from interested students, from which they needed to select three. Projects ranged from field programmable gate array (FPGA) centered video applications to creating Linux kernel drivers for specific camera hardware. Similarly TimVideos.us, an open hardware project for live event streaming and conference recording, is working on FPGA projects around video interfaces and processing.

After some preliminary work, the students came to grips with the camera’s operating processes and all three dove in enthusiastically. One student failed the first evaluation and another failed the second, but one student successfully completed their work.

That student, Vlad Niculescu, worked on defining control loops for a voltage controller using VHSIC Hardware Description Language (VHDL) for a potential future AXIOM Beta Power Board, an FPGA-driven smart switching regulator for increasing the power efficiency and improving flexibility around voltage regulation.

Left: The printed circuit board (PCB) (printed circuit board) for testing the switching regulator FPGA logic. Right: After final improvements the fluctuation ripple in the voltages was reduced to around 30mV at 2V target voltage.

Vlad had this to say about his experience:

“The knowledge I acquired during my work with this project and apertus° was very satisfying. Besides the electrical skills gained I also managed to obtain other, important universal skills. One of the things I learned was that the key to solving complex problems can often be found by dividing them into small blocks so that the greater whole can be easily observed by others. Writing better code and managing the stages of building a complex project have become lessons that will no doubt become valuable in the future. I will always be grateful to my mentor as he had the patience to explain everything carefully and teach me new things step by step, and also to apertus° and Google’s Summer of Code program, without which I may not have gained the experience of working on a project like this one.”

We are grateful for Vlad’s work and congratulate him for successfully completing the program. If you find open hardware and video production interesting, we encourage you to reach out and join the community–both apertus° and TimVideos.us are back for Google Summer of Code 2018.

By Sebastian Pichelhofer, apertus°, and Tim 'mithro' Ansell, TimVideos.us