Zikula Blog

Leslie Hawthorn of Google's Summer of Code programme just announced they received executive approval to run Google Summer of Code and the Google Highly Open Participation Contest once again in 2009. And she also announced some changes in the process of recruiting students and the application of the organizations. We have to adjust our approach accordingly.

This year's Summer of Code starts today: There's no prior application of organizations. We have to define our suggested projects and find students who are willing and able to implement them - not knowing if we are later on accepted as participating organization and not knowing if in case we are accepted their project will be accepted.

Ideas wanted!
Shortly after the end of last year's Summer of Code we opened a ticket for ideas about the Summer of Code 2009. Please add your ideas there, but keep in mind, that this is not a general Christmas list. The idea has to fit into a project of 3 months, done by a student.

Our Plan
The Steering Committee plans to go through the ideas and filter out the most interesting ones and select a number of maybe 3 or 4 which we will present in extra blog posts. Then the community is asked to advertise our suggestions so that students can apply for them.

We will then select the best 2 or 3 applications and then apply with them for the Summer of Code.

Last year we had IIRC about 10 suggestions and 4 applications for each - that was really hard to handle. Also we have to make sure we find mentors for each student and get the students involved with the community. We missed a bit out on that last year I am afraid.

Summer of Code
The Summer of Code is an annual program for students who want to get in touch with Open Source development. Google sponsors projects with 4500.- USD for the student and 500.- USD for the mentoring Open Source organisation. In turn the students have to implement the project defined by the organisation. Last year was the first year for Zikula to be accepted in the Summer of Code. 4 projects were sponsored by Google and their results are being included into Zikula in the next major releases.