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The 10th annual Google Summer of Code program will involve 1,307 students who will be working with 190 mentoring organizations around the globe as they create open-source code that will be shared with the world.
The selection of the participating students was announced by Carol Smith of the Google Open Source Programs Office, in an April 21 post on the Google Open Source Blog. “Congratulations to the 1,307 students accepted for our 2014 Google Summer of Code!” wrote Smith. “It was very tough for the 190 mentoring organizations to choose from the huge number of applications we received—6,313 proposals from 4,420 students—and we want to thank everyone who applied.”
The Summer of Code, which invites college students to learn about the world of open-source code development, began in 2005 and celebrates its 10th year in 2014. So far, the program has involved more than 8,500 college and university students from more than 100 countries who have created more than 50 million lines of code since the program’s start.
In preparation for the start of the program on May 19, the participating students will now enter the community bonding period where they will get to know their mentors and prepare for the program by reading documentation, hanging out in the IRC channel and familiarizing themselves with their new community before beginning their actual coding, wrote Smith.
“While the majority of past student participants were enrolled in university or college computer science and computer engineering programs, Google Summer of Coders come from a wide variety of educational backgrounds and degree programs (Bachelors/Masters/PhDs), from computational biology to mining engineering,” according to the program’s Website. “Many of our past participants had never participated in an open-source project before Google Summer of Code; others used the Google Summer of Code stipend as an opportunity to concentrate fully on their existing open source coding activities over the summer. Many of our ‘graduates’ have later become program mentors. This a global program run completely online.”
The mentoring organizations that will work with the students this summer include the Apache Software Foundation, the 52°North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH, CERN SFT, Blender Foundation, The Eclipse Foundation, Wikimedia, GNU Project, Drupal, Debian Project and Copyleft Games. Also involved as mentoring groups are FreeBSD, Git, GNOME, JBoss Community, Joomla!, KDE, LibreOffice, MariaDB, Mono Project, Mozilla, National Resource for Network Biology, The Linux Foundation, The OpenStack Foundation, openSUSE, Portland State University, Python Software Foundation, Ruby on Rails, Sugar Labs, The Fedora Project and The Perl Foundation.
The full list of accepted projects and their student applicants can be searched by name, mentoring organization and more.
This summer’s program kicks off May 19, with mid-term evaluations being completed from June 23-27, according to Google. Students are advised to have their work done by Aug. 11, but it must be completed by Aug. 18. Final evaluations must be completed by Aug. 22, with final results being announced on Aug. 25 for the program.
Applications for the Summer of Code 2014 program opened in March.
To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the program, Google representatives made 10 visits to countries with high participation throughout the year and held 10 developer events in promotion of the program, according to Google. Google also hiked its stipends for the program up to $5,500 this year for students who successfully complete the project. A 10-year student reunion event will also be held at Google’s campus for all the students who have participated in the program.