Google Summer of Code 2012

Here is how Google describes the goals of the GSoC program:

"Google Summer of Code is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects (see the faq for more information).

Google Summer of Code has several goals:

• Create and release open source code for the benefit of all
• Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development
• Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers
• Provide students the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits (think "flip bits, not burgers")
• Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette)"

(quoted from the official GSoC 2012 home page)

This year, the Org Mode community will apply for the first time as mentoring organisation for Google's Summer of Code program.

Students will love the opportunity to contribute to a software they might use on a daily basis anyway. Org Mode is not only one out of many interesting open-source projects out there, it is a software tool custom-made for the needs of students (and scientists in general).

They can use Org Mode for organising their life, their studies and their finances. They can write their research papers with it as well as publish their website. Not to mention their spreadsheet calculations and their (literate) programming work in some 30 Org Babel languages. And they can do all this with the unsurpassed efficiency only offered by the combination of Emacs & Org Mode.

Working on an Org Mode project this summer not only will make the students better (Emacs) Lisp programmers, it will make them better students too, since skilled Elisp programmers are Emacs power users by definition and can make the most out of their exceptionally powerfull software tool.

The students will have the exciting opportunity to join one of the most dynamic open-source projects today with a big, active, skilled and very helpfull community. Since the Org Mode project is in such a dynamic momentum, there are plenty of usefull ideas for student projects around. In fact, some long desired features for Org Mode might finally be realized through students projects during the GSoC 2012.

Org Mode contributers that are not students anymore, but would like to see some of their ideas with regards to Org Mode come true, are invited to post these ideas on the ideas page and apply as mentors. Students are encouraged to either apply for one of the proposed projects on the ideas page or submit their own ideas and ask one of the experienced Org Mode contributors if he would like to mentor their project.

Although all related information can be found on the GSoC 2012 home page, we prepared an admin page, a mentor page and a student page that only gives the information relevant for the respective group. Remember that these pages only serve for a quick overview. The complete, up-to-date and authorized information can be found on the original GSoC 2012 home page.

The most important page is the ideas page. Since the application process is a two step process, first the organisation (Org), then the students, all student projects depend on the successfull application of the mentoring organisation.

Therefore we should try to build a nice ideas page, grouping the proposals by topics, with a description for each idea. It would be nice to associate each idea with a mentor too.

These are the student-projects for the GSoC 2012: