GNOME’s Google Summer of Code: Let your students code.

Every now and then I’m trying to help prune our big (> 180 elligible) list of applications. The quality of applications is much better than last year, so we have to be quite critical. Even where the applications aren’t great, the students seem to have lots of ability and enthusiasm.

I don’t want these people to get away from us when we have to reject their applications. Their universities should let them spend the time on these projects even if they aren’t getting paid for it by Google. They’ll learn far more than they would during three months of lectures and assignments. Some of the world’s best software developers would love to mentor them. And they’d be a great advertisment for the university.

8 thoughts on “GNOME’s Google Summer of Code: Let your students code.

  1. I agree with you completely except for one thing: While this time might be the term break in the US, in Germany its now the middle of the lecture period. In my opinition, thats not exactly a good time to encourage our students to work on SoC projects ;-) Lecture period is till the end of July (at least at our university) so if you guys would put up an updated list of whats still available at the beginning of August I’ll post it on our faculty noticeboard!

    For the record, I’m one of the persons responsible for the software engineering education at Bielefeld University, Germany.

  2. Ingo, sure, we’ll try to remember to do that.

    But will your students have time during the break? The idea of SoC is that they otherwise have to do worthless jobs during the summer just to survive. My idea was that you could integrate Open-Source mentoring into your regular course time.

  3. It’s not just in Germany but pretty much everywhere in Europe. I’m glad I studied this year in Canada, so I could finish early and apply, last year I was studying in Belgium and exams prevented me from participate too.

  4. Google (Chris DeBona) already know about the problem of different parts of the world having student holidays at different times – I’ve seen some messages on the summer of code mailing list. I have no idea whether they do intend to make the program more flexible. I can imagine that they might not want the extra complication.

  5. Murray, concerning whether they have time: At least at our faculty, and I’m assuming that is true for most other computer science programmes, the Diplom and Master students have a fairly large mandatory project assignment where they can work on a project of their choosing, for credit points (usually in groups of 4 to 8 students). These projects can be jointly with “industry”, so I would see absolutely no problem in a GNOME project. Of course, they would have to find faculty to supervise the project from the university’s side and many faculty prefer people working on their own projects…. However, I can personally say that I would gladly supervise such a project if the task is equivalent to what we would usually expect — and thats something that should almost always be possible to work out. btw, given that we have a strong signal processing and pattern recognition focus here, something GStreamer-related might make a good project.

  6. Hey there, I am a user of the GNOME operating system and would love to contribute during my gap year working for Intel. Does an opportunity exist to be mentored on coding for any GNOME apps even without the incentive of the Google Cashlump?

    I think a great way to get more developers or anything is to make the core designers more approachable – either by offering some mentoring or even just having a blog for the developer with it clearly stating which projects he/she is involved in maintaining.

    I don’t really need cash to do something I enjoy – as good as google SoC is, it does tend to bring out some mercenary candidates!

    (And yes I know I’m posting from Opera on Windows :S)

  7. Google is giving an outstanding perfomance since it was made.Now in the ground of knowledge it is the one of the developing bridge for all the students as well.

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