By Carol Smith and Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

At Google we are passionate about introducing students from around the world to open source software development. Since 2005, Google has worked with over 10,000 students and over 440 open source projects in a variety of fields to create more code for the masses.

A call out to all students: if you have ever thought it would be cool to write code and see it make a difference in the world then please keep reading. We are excited to announce the next editions of  two programs designed to introduce students to open source software development, Google Summer of Code (for university students) and Google Code-in (for 13-17 year old students).

Google Summer of Code 

Back in 2005, Google made a commitment to support open source software contributors. In addition to our other programs to build and support the contributor base, we thought a great way to increase awareness was to introduce the wide world of open source to college students. Google Summer of Code was born: match student developers from around the world with open source software organizations to work on a project while on break from their universities. 

With over 8,300 mentors in 100 countries around the world, the 8,500 student developers have produced a stunning 50 million lines of code. The program will now be reaching its 10th instance in 2014. 

We told you on the Official Google Blog just a few highlights of what we’ll be up to this year, and now we want to tell you all the details:  

1. 10 visits to countries with high participation throughout the year.
2. 10 developer events in promotion of the program. 
3. 10 mentors who have participated in Google Summer of Code will be featured on our open source blog.
4. 10% additional student stipend (a total of $5500 for students who successfully complete the whole program).
5. 10% more students than we’ve ever had participate in the program before.
6. 10 more mentoring organizations than we’ve ever had in the program will be participating in Google Summer of Code 2014
7. 10 year student reunion event will be held on Google’s Mountain View campus next year for all the students who have participated in the program. 
8. 10 year reunion mentor summit will be held on Google’s Mountain View campus for all our Google Summer of Code organization alumni.
9. 10 students/organizations will be chosen to highlight their work at the Google booths at open source events throughout the year.
10. 10 student projects from the past nine years will be highlighted on the open source blog and YouTube.

We’re pleased to be running a program that touches a lot of lives around the world, and we hope this will be a celebration of all the accomplishments we’ve seen from so many of our participants. Watch this blog for announcements about our travel and our efforts over the next year. Here’s to 10 Things! 

Google Code-in - Program starts for students November 18th

For the fourth consecutive year we are thrilled to announce Google Code-in, an international contest designed to introduce 13-17 year old pre-university students to the world of open source development. Open source projects are about more than just coding, and this contest highlights a variety of ways to contribute to open source projects. Every year, open source software is becoming more important around the globe; from government, healthcare, relief efforts, gaming, to large tech companies and everything in between. 

When you read the term open source do you think:

• What is open source?
• What types of work do open source projects do?
• I’ve only taken one computer science class, can I contribute to an open source project?
• I’m not really into coding, what else can I do to contribute to open source?
• I’ve never participated in open source or an online contest before, can someone help guide me?
• Open source sounds cool, how can I get started?

If you’ve wondered about any of these questions and are a pre-university student (age 13-17) then we hope you will join in the fun and excitement of the Google Code-in contest starting Monday, November 18th. 

The different categories of tasks that students will be able to work on include:

1. Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code
2. Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
3. Outreach/research: Tasks related to community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
4. Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of high quality
5. User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user interface design and interaction

Over the past 3 years we have had over 1200 students from 71 countries complete tasks in the contest. In April, we flew the 20 Google Code-in 2012 Grand Prize winners and a parent to Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters for a 5 day/4 night trip where they enjoyed talking with Google engineers, an awards ceremony, a Google campus tour, and a full day of fun in San Francisco. 

Visit the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Google Code-in 2013 site for more details on how to sign up and participate. And please help us spread the word to your friends around the globe! If you are a teacher that would like to encourage your students to participate, please send an email to our team at [email protected]. We would be happy to answer any questions you may have. 

Stay tuned to the contest site and subscribe to our mailing list for more updates on the contest. We will announce the 10 open source organizations that will be participating in the contest on November 1. The Google Code-in contest starts for students on November 18, 2013. We look forward to welcoming hundreds of students from around the world into the open source family again this year.

We hope you will help us spread the word about these two programs to all the pre-university and university students in your life. Stay tuned to this blog for more announcements in the coming weeks about both programs.


Written by Carol Smith and Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source team

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

If you’re a university student with CS chops looking to earn real-world experience this summer, consider writing code for a cool open source project with the Google Summer of Code program.


Over the past eight years more than 6,000 students have “graduated” from this global program, working with almost 400 different open source projects. Students who are accepted into the program will put the skills they have learned in university to good use by working on an actual software project over the summer. Students are paired with mentors to help address technical questions and concerns throughout the course of the project. With the knowledge and hands-on experience students gain during the summer they strengthen their future employment opportunities in fields related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Interested students can submit proposals on the website starting now through Friday, May 3 at 12:00pm PDT. Get started by reviewing the ideas pages of the 177 open source projects in this year’s program, and decide which projects you’re interested in. Because Google Summer of Code has a limited number of spots for students, writing a great project proposal is essential to being selected to the program. Be sure to check out the Student Manual for advice.

For ongoing information throughout the application period and beyond, see the Google Open Source blog, join our Summer of Code mailing lists or join us on Internet relay chat at #gsoc on Freenode.

Good luck to all the open source coders out there, and remember to submit your proposals early—you only have until May 3 to apply!


Written by Stephanie Taylor, Open Source team

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog

I am proud to share the news that Google Summer of Code 2013 will be happening again this year.

This will be the 9th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past eight years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 100 countries complete the program. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student who would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2013 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!


Written by Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Scott Knaster, Google Developers Blog Editor

Google Summer of Code, now in its eighth year, is a wonderful program that releases eager university students onto open source projects. To help participants succeed, the program connects students with mentors to guide them on their open source way.

Google Summer of Code wouldn’t work without a great bunch of mentors, and the program is now accepting applications from open source projects that want to provide mentors to participants. If you’re involved in an open source project, this is an excellent way for you to find and teach new developers, and of course to get them interested in your project in particular. The deadline for mentor applications is March 9, which is next Friday, so if you’re interested, don’t delay.

All Google Summer of Code mentors are required to be human for now. But experimenters are looking into what it takes for a robot to be a leader – of fish. To test their ideas, researchers at Polytechnic Institute of New York University built a robotic fish. By varying the way its tail moved and the speed of its swimming, the scientists were able to get their robot to assume a leadership role, with other fish swimming behind.

Finally, if science fiction movies have you concerned that humans might someday lose their leadership status to other primates, you can take comfort in a study that showed human children working together, while chimps and monkeys didn’t share tasks at all. In fact, adult non-humans didn’t even help their young: one of the study’s authors said that parents simply stole their offspring’s food. So, go humans!


On Fridays we (mostly) take a break from the real news and do a Fridaygram post just for fun. Each Fridaygram item must pass only one test: it has to be interesting to us nerds. We’re happy to have you reading Fridaygram, whether you’re human, ape, robotic fish, or other.

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog


Today at FOSDEM I was proud to announce Google Summer of Code 2012.

This will be the 8th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past seven years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 90 countries complete the program. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student that would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2012 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!


Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs Office

(Cross-posted from the Google Open Source Blog.)


We have announced the 1,116 students who will be participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code program. Students will now start 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 at the end of May.

If you are interested in learning more about the 175 organizations that the students will be working with during the 2011 Google Summer of Code or important dates, please visit the program website.

Congratulations to our accepted students! We look forward to an exciting and productive summer of coding.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

(Cross-posted with the Google Open Source Blog.)

Google Summer of Code is a global program where university students are given a stipend to write code for open source projects over a three month period. Through Google Summer of Code, accepted students are paired with a mentor from the participating projects, gaining exposure to real-world software development and the opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits. Best of all, more source code is created and released for the use and benefit of all.

Google Summer of Code is a highly competitive program with a limited number of students being accepted. We are pleased to announce that this year we have enlarged the program so that we can accept as many as 150 additional students. We hope all interested students will apply!

Now it is time for the students to submit their proposals to the accepted mentoring organizations via the Google Summer of Code program website from today through Friday, April 8th 19:00 UTC. For the past 10 days students have had the opportunity to review the Ideas pages for this year’s 175 accepted projects and to research which projects they would like to contribute to for this year’s Google Summer of Code.

Every year we have thousands of students who apply for the Google Summer of Code program but due to the limited number of slots many students are not able to be a part of the program. The quality of your proposal is what will make you stand out from your peers. Students should consult the Google Summer of Code student manual for suggestions on how to write a proposal that will grab the attention of the mentoring organizations. Multiple proposals are allowed but we highly recommend focusing on quality over quantity. The mentoring organizations have many proposals to review, so it is important to follow each organization’s specific guidelines or templates and we advise you to submit your proposal early so you can receive timely feedback.

(Cross-posted from the Google Open Source Blog.)

Interested in finding bright, enthusiastic new contributors to your open source project? Apply to be a mentoring organization in our Google Summer of Code program. We are now accepting applications from open source projects interested in acting as mentoring organizations.

Now in its 7th year, Google Summer of Code is a program designed to pair university students from around the world with mentors at open source projects in such varied fields as academia, language translations, content management systems, games, and operating systems. Since 2005, over 4,500 students from 85 countries have completed the Google Summer of Code program with the support of over 300 mentoring organizations. Students earn a stipend for their work during the program, allowing students to gain exposure to real-world software development and an opportunity for employment in areas related to their academic pursuits, thus “flipping bits, not burgers” during their school break. In return, mentoring organizations have the opportunity to identify and attract new developers to their projects and these students often continue their work with the organizations after Google Summer of Code concludes.

This year we’re excited to expand the scope of the program by encouraging experienced Google Summer of Code mentoring organizations to refer newer, smaller organizations they think could benefit from the program to apply to be mentoring organizations.

The deadline for applying to be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code is Friday, March 11th at 23:00 UTC (3pm PST). The list of accepted organizations will be posted on the Google Summer of Code site on Friday, March 18th. Students will then have 10 days to reach out to the accepted organizations and discuss their ideas before we begin accepting student applications on March 28th.

Please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page for more details. You can also check out the Mentor Manual and timeline for additional information. Good luck to all of our mentoring organization applicants!

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team

(Cross-posted from the Google Open Source Blog)

Despite the recent devastating floods in Australia, the open source community is converging on Brisbane this week for the annual linux.conf.au (LCA). The LCA team “encourages everyone to still come to Brisbane and support local business and the community - we need your support.” Monday during the introductory session at LCA, Carol Smith, member of the Google Open Source Programs Office, proudly announced Google Summer of Code 2011.

This will be the 7th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development. The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past 6 years Google Summer of Code has had 4,500 students from over 85 countries complete the program. We are excited to announce that we will extend the scope of the program this year by targeting a 25% increase in accepted student applications as well as accepting a larger number of mentoring organizations. Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all.

Spread the word to your friends! If you know of a university student that would be interested in working on open source projects this summer, or if you know of an organization that might want to mentor students to work on their open source projects, please direct them to our Google Summer of Code 2011 website where they can find our timeline along with the FAQs. And stay tuned for more details coming soon!

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Team

Google Summer of Code^TM, our flagship program to introduce college students to open source development, opens today. Over the past five years, we've seen more than 3,400 successful students "graduate" from the program, and we're looking forward to welcoming another group of students for our sixth year. We're now accepting applications from open source projects who wish to act as mentoring organizations and will begin accepting applications from students on March 29th. For more details, check out the Google Open Source Blog.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Google Summer of Code^TM, our flagship program to introduce college students to open source development, opens today. Over the past four years, we've seen nearly 2,500 successful students "graduate" from the program, and we're looking forward to welcoming another group of students for our fifth year. We're now accepting applications from open source projects who wish to act as mentoring organizations and will begin accepting applications from students on March 23rd. For more details, check out the Google Open Source Blog.

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

It may only be March, but the heat is on — Google Summer of Code is back for 2008! Last year, nearly 900 students teamed up with over 2,000 mentors to write millions of lines of code. We're looking forward to another year of introducing university students to open source development and helping our colleagues in the open source world find new contributors and get more code written.

We're taking applications from open source projects who'd like to mentor students today through March 13th. For full details, see the program site.

We'd love to hear from you, so join us in #gsoc on Freenode or join the program discussion list.

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

The Danish Linux Conference is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year, and the date is coming up soon! I'll be there to present on Google, Open Source and the Google Summer of Code ™ program on Saturday, March 3.

GSoCers, keep an eye out for me; I'll be sporting the orange and black Google Summer of Code t-shirt. If anyone in attendance has any questions about Google or our open source efforts, I would love to talk to you.

Hope to see you there!