It has become a tradition now: Google is organizing a Summer of Code this year again, and quite a big number of organizations will be involved in mentoring students. We can certainly expect some good stuff to happen thanks to this program! Some students have already started applying: the application period began last week and will end next Friday. Oh, by the way, dear students: submitting your application a few days before the deadline is a good way to make sure that potential mentors can love you ;-)

Of course, GNOME is participating as a mentoring organization, as well as openSUSE. There are some quite good ideas in both cases, but of course, students are welcome to apply with their own idea. When applying, keep in mind that one of the most important things is that the application is well-written and detailed, and comes with a good plan. Also, in the case of GNOME, we ask students to provide a patch -- this is a step that lets mentors easily know if the student can at least get the code and compile it ;-) (and the quality of a patch, or the way it's written, actually often tells us a lot about the student)

A big difference for me this year is that I'm not an administrator on the GNOME side (I agreed to help a bit for openSUSE, but Zonker is doing all the work). Last year, Adam and Sandy did a great job for the organization, so it was not a big surprise to see them step up for the task this year!

Of course, even if I'm not an admin, I'm still curious; so I'm looking at the student applications and adding a comment here or there, but nothing really big. I might mentor a project, though, if the idea I proposed for openSUSE seduces a student and gets well-ranked, or if a student comes with something I'd really love to see and where I could help! I guess we'll know in a few days ;-)