GSoC names mentors, GNOME seeks internship applicants

Google has announced the mentoring organisations for the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2013. After reviewing 417 applications, the company has selected 177 open source projects to participate in this year's cycle of the program that brings together organisations and students to foster development of open source code. Google pays the students a stipend while they work on projects chosen by the mentoring organisations, which provide guidance and training to the participating students.

The application period for students will open on 22 April and conclude on 3 May, at which point the mentoring organisations will pick among student's proposals. Google says interested students should use the time until the application period opens to familiarise themselves with prospective mentoring organisations' ideas pages to discover which areas the various organisations are interested in. As with previous GSoCs, the mentoring organisations will decide for themselves which student proposals interest them most. In the previous eight cycles of the program, more than 6000 students from over 100 countries have taken part. Last year's completion rate among the 1200 participating students was 88 per cent.

Meanwhile, GStreamer developer Christian Schaller has announced in his blog that the open source media framework has been rejected for this year's GSoC. Google has not yet given the project feedback on the reasons behind this, but Schaller notes that the PiTiVi video editor has been accepted as a mentoring organisation.

GNOME's Outreach Program for Women is also currently looking for applicants for its sixth round of mentoring. Similar to the Google Summer of Code, GNOME's Outreach Program brings together mentoring organisations and female applicants who receive a stipend in return for work they do for open source projects and communities. Unlike GSoC, the GNOME Outreach Program is looking for individuals with skills in all areas that can benefit open source projects, not only software development. Participants with skills in programming, design, documentation or marketing are all welcome.

The application deadline for Round 6 of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women is 1 May, the full-time internships take place from 17 June to 23 September. Participating in the program as mentoring organisations are, among others, GNOME itself, KDE, Debian, Mozilla, the Tor Project, Wikimedia and Wikia. Other organisations are still welcome to join.

(fab)