Highlights From the 2009 Google Summer of Code 72
mask.of.sanity writes "Over a 1000 students were accepted into the fifth year of the program from 70 countries and will work on about 150 open source projects with mentor organisations.
The program, created in 2005, has exposed some 2500 students to "real-world" software development and opened employment opportunities within mentor organisations and in fields relevant to their academic study.
The United States scored the lion's share with 212 accepted students; 101 from India; 55 from Germany; 44 from Canada, 43 from Brazil. The Dominican Republic, Iceland, Luxembourg and Nigeria were new entrants to the program each with a single accepted student.
Check out the slideshow summary of some project highlights, with hyperlinks back the detailed project pages."
liqbase was accepted! (Score:5, Interesting)
I am so pleased that I have an extra pair of hands over the summer.
my liqbase project was one proposal out of 10 selected for the maemo.org community.
we are building applications for the nokia internet tablet device.
obviously I should show off what I'm building ;)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMXp0Dg_UaY [youtube.com]
I got accepted! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Thanks Google (Score:3, Interesting)
5 million is not really a huge investement for really big organizations. That's a pool of 1000 potential new hires. Consider what it would cost to get recruit 1000 new graduates, and have them working for 3 months while you find out whether they are any good. Consider what it would cost to supervise them, if it wasn't for the mentor organizations.
What's the headhunter fee for a good engineer?
This is a smart move by Google.
today's interesting but useless metric: (Score:5, Interesting)
Google SoC Projects per Capita:
United States: 0.69 ppm
India: 0.09 ppm
Germany: 0.67 ppm
Canada: 1.31 ppm
Brazil: 0.22 ppm
PPM = projects per million. Figure the U.S. benefits from Google being a U.S. company, and by the fact that English is the native language. Canada would also benefit in that respect. But if that's the case then where's the U.K.? Germany suffers from not having English as the native language, but then again, open source in general is probably more popular in Europe than in the U.S.
Re:today's interesting but useless metric: (Score:2, Interesting)
In 2008, the UK had the 10th highest [blogspot.com] number of applicants (and accepted students). There was a spreadsheet posted a few weeks ago with details of which countries and even which universities had students accepted over the past few years of GSoC, but alas I can't find it right now.
Re:Will be "mentoring" two participants. (Score:4, Interesting)
I will be mentoring a student, too.
And yes, I expect to be bouncing patches back to students (we have two), and suggest improvements, and maybe even provide a code example here and there to help them. It's part of the learning process they will go through. Just like any contributor.
But coding is only one side of open source development. There are many more. Another goal is to try to integrate the student with the project, and let it be a fun and rewarding experience. If students stay with the project even after the summer of code is over, you've done the best possible job as a mentor. That is the hard part. It's much harder than getting the code right.