Google Summer of Code

Summer of Code logo.

Summer of Code logo.

The Google Summer of Code is an annual program, first held during the northern hemisphere summer of 2005, in which Google awards cash prizes to students who successfully complete a free software / open-source coding project during the summer. The event draws its name from the 1967 Summer of Love.

Overview

The program invites students who meet their eligibility criteria to post applications that detail the project they wish to perform. These applications are then evaluated by the corresponding mentoring organization. Every participating organization must provide mentors for each of the project ideas received, if the organization is of the opinion that the project would benefit them. The mentors then rank the applications and submit the ranked list to Google. Google then decides how many projects each organization gets, and selects the top-n applications for that organization, where n is the number of projects assigned to them.

In the event of a single student being present in the top-n of more than one organization, Google mediates between all the involved organizations and decides who "gets" that student. The slots freed up on the other mentoring organization are passed to the next-best ranked application in that pile.

Current

Google has chosen 131 open source organisations to participate for the 2007 Google Summer of Code, up from 102 organisations in 2006. Each organisation was chosen on a number of criteria, such as the virtue of the projects, the ideas given for students to work on, and the ability of the mentors to ensure students successfully completed projects.

Students have until 16:00 UTC March 27[1] to provide a compelling application to Google and the respective organisations, on why they are the most suitable candidate to have the project, and consequently be mentored and paid. 800 students are expected to be selected, up from 630 last year, with thousands of applications expected to be made overall.

Timeframe

• March 5: Mentoring organizations can begin submitting applications to Google
• March 12: Mentoring organization application deadline
• March 13: Google program administrators review organization applications
• March 14: List of accepted mentoring organizations published on code.google.com; student application period opens
• March 27: Student application deadline
• Interim Period: Mentoring organizations review and rank student proposals; where necessary, mentoring organizations may request further proposal detail from the student applicant
• April 11: List of accepted student applications published on code.google.com
• Interim Period: Students learn more about their project communities
• May 28: Students begin coding for their GSoC projects; Google begins issuing initial student payments
• Interim Period: Mentors give students a helping hand and guidance on their projects
• July 9: Students upload code to code.google.com/hosting; mentors begin mid-term evaluations
• July 16: Mid-term evaluation deadline; Google begins issuing mid-term student payments
• August 20: Students upload code to code.google.com/hosting; mentors begin final evaluations; students begin final program evaluations
• August 31: Final evaluation deadline; Google begins issuing student and mentoring organization payments

History

2005

In 2005, more than 8,000 project proposals were submitted for the 200 available student positions. Due to the overwhelming response, Google expanded the program to 419 positions.

The mentoring organizations were responsible for reviewing and selecting proposals, and then providing guidance to those students to help them complete their proposal. Students that successfully completed their proposal to the satisfaction of their mentoring organization were awarded $4500 and a Google Summer of Code T-shirt, while $500 per project was sent to the mentoring organization. Approximately 80% of the projects were successfully completed in 2005.

For the first Summer of Code, Google was criticized for not giving sufficient time to open source organizations so they could plan projects for the Summer of Code. Despite these criticisms there were 39 organizations involved, including FreeBSD, Apache, Ubuntu, Blender, Mozdev, and several others including Google itself.

Also, a majority of the projects initiated by participants at the 2005 SoC stalled immediately afterward. According to a blog post by Chris DiBona, Google's open source program manager, "something like 30 percent of the students stuck with their groups post SoC [Summer of Code]." Mozilla developer Gervase Markham also commented that none of the 10 Google-sponsored Mozilla projects survived after the event.[2] However, the Gaim project was able to enlist enough coding support through the event to include the changes into Gaim 2.0; the Jabber Software Foundation and KDE project also counted a few surviving projects of their own from the event (KDE only counted 1 continuing project from out of the 24 projects which it sponsored).

2006

In 2006, around 6000 applications were submitted, less than the previous year due to the fact that all applicants were required to have Google Accounts, thereby reducing the amount of spam applications received. Google and most mentors are also of the opinion that the proposals were of much higher quality than 2005's applications. Also, the number of participating organizations almost tripled to 102. In addition to the organizations that participated in 2005, organisations such as Debian, GNU, Gentoo, Adium and PHP participated in 2006. Google had decided to sponsor around 600 projects.

The student application deadline was extended until 2006-05-09, at 11:00 PDT. Although the results were to be declared by 5:00 PM PDT, there was considerable delay in publishing it as Google had not expected several students to be selected in more than one organisation. Google allows one student to undertake only one project as part of the program. It took Google several hours to resolve the "dupes" (a term used by the Google staff to indicate a student who had been accepted by more than one organization). The acceptance letters were sent out on May 24, at 3:13 AM PDT, but the letters were also sent out to some 1,600 applicants who had in fact, not been accepted by Google's SoC committee. At 3:38 AM PDT, Chris DiBona posted an apology to the official mailing list, adding that "We're very deeply sorry for this. If you received two e-mails, one that said you were accepted and one that you were not, this means you were not."

Google has released a final list of projects accepted into the program on the SoC website. The proposals themselves were visible to the public for a few hours, after which they were taken down in response to complaints by the participants about the "sensitive and private" information that their applications contained. However, Google has since resolved these issues by allowing each student involved in Summer of Code to provide a brief abstract message that is publicly viewable and completely separate from the content of the actual proposal that was submitted to Google.

The Summer of Code 2006 ended on 2006-09-08. According to Google, 82% of the students received a positive evaluation at the end of the program.

2007

In 2007, Google accepted 131 organizations and over 900 students. Students were allowed to submit up to 20 applications although only one could be accepted. Google received nearly 6,200 applications.

To allow more students to apply, Google extended the application deadline from March 24th to March 26th at the last minute.

On April 11th, the acceptance letters were delayed due to additional efforts involved in resolving dupes. At one point, the web interface changed each application to have a status of Not Selected, causing "huge number of Summer of Code result-awaiting nerds [to] just [suffer] a collective heart attack". Google officials reported that only the acceptance email was the definitive indication of acceptance.

External links

• Official Website
• Planet-SoC
• InternetNews article on SoC success rate
• InternetNews article on the results of SoC 2006