CiviCRM and Google Summer of Code

CiviCRM is considering applying to be a mentoring organization in Google's Summer of Code program (GSOC). If you're not familiar with GSOC, you should be! (http://socghop.appspot.com/) -- it's a fantastic program that can jointly help open source projects advance development, while encouraging students to become involved in the open source community. The basic thrust of the program is that Google sponsors students (monetary stipend) to work on projects for open source software. In past years, CiviCRM has benefited from GSOC support through CMS mentor organizations -- last year Joomla! had two CiviCRM integration projects as part of GSOC. Becoming a mentoring organization requires a fair amount of work, and the window of time to decide whether CiviCRM should do this is relatively small (the application deadline is end of Friday, UTC). Before a decision is made, we'd like to get a sense of whether there is sufficient community support. If you are interested in becoming a MENTOR, or are a STUDENT developer who might be interested in participating, please email me (Brian) at: brian at lcdservices dot biz. Mentors are assigned to students/projects and provide ongoing support, guidance, and project oversight. We would like to have two mentors assigned to each student, though a mentor may be part of multiple projects. Students... well, students do the work and receive the stipend. I'm basically looking to get a general sense of how many potential mentors and students are interested in the program before we decide whether to proceed with the application.

Comments

I think it would be helpful to make a tentative list of possible projects, that way you might attract students with particular interest who might not know much about CiviCRM.

For example (just examples):

• improvement of web application unit testing (such as UI for easy creation of test cases/bug reports integrated into demo site through selenium firefox IDE),
• implementing n-gram searches for location, e-mail and name matching in civicrm,
• integration of analytical functionality of CiviReports with gmaps

I repeat the above are just examples that I though of this minute, my point is that I am sure you would be able to attract students and get both useful and interesting work done, just maybe have to start preparing earlier for it :) (actually I just read the whole post, especially the fact that the deadline is on Friday...posting anyway)