Mentoring Organization Applications is Accepted for Google Summer of Code 2012!

Interested in finding bright, enthusiastic new contributors to your open source project? Apply to be a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code program. We are now accepting applications from open source projects interested in acting as mentoring organizations.

Now in its eighth year, Google Summer of Code is a program designed to pair university students from around the world with mentors at open source projects in such varied fields as academic research, language translations, content management systems, games, and operating systems. Since 2005, over 6,000 students from 90 countries have completed the Google Summer of Code program with the support of over 350 mentoring organizations. Students gain exposure to real-world software development while earning a stipend for their work and an opportunity to explore areas related to their academic pursuits, thus “flipping bits, not burgers” during their school break. In return, mentoring organizations have the opportunity to identify and attract new developers to their projects as these students often continue their work with the organizations after Google Summer of Code concludes.

This year we are again encouraging experienced Google Summer of Code mentoring organizations to refer newer, smaller organizations they think could benefit from the program to apply. Last year we had 49 of these small organizations join the program and we hope the referral program will again bring many more new organizations to the Google Summer of Code program.

The deadline for applying to be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code is Friday, March 9th at 23:00 UTC (3pm PST). The list of accepted organizations will be posted on the Google Summer of Code site on Friday, March 16th. Students will then have 10 days to reach out to the accepted organizations to discuss their project ideas before we begin accepting student applications on March 26th.

Please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page for more details. For more information you can check out the Mentor Manual and timeline for and join the discussion group. Good luck to all of our mentoring organization applicants!

Google Code-in Check-in

We wanted to do a quick check-in on Google Code-in to let you know how the contest is going. We are just over four weeks into the contest – more than halfway. We’re quite excited about the participation thus far and hope more of you are planning to get involved in the coming days.
As of today we have more than 290 participants who have completed at least one task. There have been 813 tasks completed by all our student participants so far for a combined point total of 1,605. Points are calculated according to difficulty of the task: “Hard” tasks are worth 4 points, “Medium” tasks are worth 2 points, and “Easy” tasks are worth 1 point.
We’re also quite impressed with the international representation we’ve gotten from the contest – over 75% of our participants are from outside the United States. Our top 10 participating countries in order are: United States, Romania, Bulgaria, Russian Federation, Poland, Canada, Germany, India, Italy, and Belarus.
We would love to have more students participate! There are currently over 400 tasks that are unclaimed and need someone to work on them.
Remember, the contest ends on January 10, 2011. Don’t delay, claim a task today!