Google Summer of Code 2011: midterms and statistics

Google has published "a few more interesting statistics" from this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) event; in May, a statistical breakdown of accepted students was published. According to a post by Stephanie Taylor on the Google Open Source Blog, 202 (18.1%) of this year's 1,115 student participants took part in last year's programme. Of those students, 35 were also part of the 2009 programme, meaning that 3.1% are three year students.

The 175 mentoring organisations participating in the 2011 GSoC come from 55 countries and received a total of 5,651 proposals, averaging 32 per organisation. Taylor notes that this is the first year that there have been mentors from Bangladesh, Belarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kingdom of Cambodia, Egypt, Iceland and Indonesia in GSoC.

One week ago, the 2011 GSoC event reached its halfway point with midterm evaluations in which students submit their evaluations and Google issues midterm student payments of $2,250. Several open source projects have already announced that their students have passed their midterm evaluations, including Python, the GIMP image editor, the DragonFly BSD distribution and the open source ORGE 3D graphics engine. The next milestone date for the programme will be "pencils down" on 15 August when students are given a week to "scrub their code, write tests, improve calculations, and so forth" before coding ends on 22 August.

Each year Google seeks students and mentors from the FOSS community to take part in its GSoC event, which takes place over a period of three months. The GSoC contests offer university students stipends to write and develop code for various open source projects. Over the past six years, 4,500 students from more than 85 countries have completed the GSoC program with support from over 300 mentoring organisations.

More details about the Google Summer of Code 2011 program can be found on the GSoC 2011 site – a full overview of GSoC program statistics is provided on the Program Information for Past Years page.

(crve)