I wanted to post this announce on Monday, but got busy with other things... But it's not too late: in a bit less than 6 hours (at 19:00 UTC), a small team of GNOME mentors for the Google Summer of Code will meet and work hard to select the projects that we'll mentor this year. I guess that, like for all previous years, people will fight hard for their favorite projects ;-) It's generally not easy, since there are some really interesting projects that we might need to reject. If you want to participate to this meeting and you don't know where it will occur (which means you're not subscribed to soc-mentors-list!), ping me on IRC.

I took nearly all my Monday afternoon to browse again most of the applications. I could at least identify one thing that we did bad this year: there are applications related to many GNOME modules, and for some of those applications, no maintainer of the relevant module commented or even took a look. I tried to ping (or to have someone else ping) those maintainers to get their opinion about the project, so all in all, we should be fine, but that will be something to keep in mind for next year, I guess. Also, we received quite less applications than last year -- I guess this can be explained by the fact that some projects like Gnumeric or GStreamer are now directly participating to GSoC. However, the good news is that I have the feeling we have around the same number of good applications.

Can't wait the meeting to at last know what projects we'll be able to watch during the summer :-)

There are some events that make you quite happy. On Monday, I pinged my favorite brazilian hacker to start triaging our list of project ideas for the Google Summer of Code. I didn't want to do this alone, and it was time to do it since the student application period was about to start. Lucas then appeared on IRC. But we were not only two: Adam, Daniel (who is really German, don't listen to him trying to argue that he's not), Marco and Sandy decided to step up and join the discussion. The amazing thing is that all this process was quite long (something like four hours) but everybody took the time to contribute. That's cool. Really cool.

Since I'm talking about GSoC, I might as well go on and try to get more people involved as mentors :-) Everybody potentially willing to mentor for GNOME should register in the web application as soon as possible, since we're already receiving some applications. And we need to start looking at them and discussing with students now. Also, make sure to subscribe to the soc-mentors-list mailing list, since this is the private place where mentors and administrators can talk about proposals, students, problems, good things, etc. If you're interested in being part of the small team (around 10 people) that will have the last word about which applications we accept, make sure to contact Behdad, Christian, Lucas or me. The easiest way is probably to send a mail to soc-mentors-list.

Oh, maybe some students are also reading this blog? Well, now it's time for you to apply. Go read the small documentation that Clare and Marco (who participated to WSOP and GSoC in the past) wrote. You can also look at those notes from Buddhika who also was a GSoC student. I'm sure every student can find a project he wants to work on. There are so many mentoring organizations that I can't imagine that someone will fail to find something of interest to him. There's GNOME, of course, but if you're interested in GNOME, you might also be interested in Abiword, cairo, the GIMP, Gnumeric, GStreamer, Inkscape or X.org. But that's not all, I'm sure there will be some cool projects being mentored by vim, the XMPP Foundation, or our friends at KDE. Also check out the openSUSE ideas! Woo, maybe there are too many good projects? :-)