Google Summer of Code

I'm at DrupalCon Paris right now, and between the amazing people, interesting sessions, and gorgeous City of Lights, I only have a few moments, but I wanted to make a quick (and exciting) announcement. The Google Summer of Code officially wrapped up last week, and the Drupal students and mentors did an amazing job this year. “How amazing?," you ask. Well, not only did all 18 of the students that worked directly with Drupal mentors successfully complete their projects, but we got an extra bonus successful student.

Mentors and students, there are only a few short days before the applications get locked down, and there are some important items you need to know about.

Mentors
- The Drupal Summer of Code Mentors group is closing down, at least as a private group, due to the phasing out of private groups here on groups.drupal.org. There have been a lot of questions about scoring and applications in general, and these should now be brought to our private Drupal Summer of Code Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/drupal-soc .
- If you plan on mentoring, either as a primary or secondary mentor, you should post a public comment in the official application on the Summer of Code site. If you haven't signed up on the SoC site, please do so now! http://socghop.appspot.com/org/list_proposals/google/gsoc2009/drupal
- Please use the new Google Group to ask any questions you have about the program, if possible, though you can always feel free to contact me directly.
- Please be aware that on the official site notifications are not automatically sent to you, even if you're the mentor on a project. Please click the buttons at the top of each proposal where you'd like to get notified about updates.
- If you've given a negative score to students based off of missing data, please subscribe to the notifications for that proposal so you'll know if students address your concerns.

Students
- You must have a mentor officially assigned to your project by April 15th, so you should be doing everything you can to find a mentor if you don't have one already. Please be aware that this is a hard date and we have no power to push it back. If you're having a problem finding a mentor, please leave a comment here and/or try to find myself, chx, dmitrig01, or any other SoC mentor/admin/helper in the #drupal irc room.
- Please be aware that on the official site notifications are not automatically sent to you, even if you're the creator of a project idea. Please click the subscribe buttons at the top of your proposal to receive updates.

I just wanted to draw your attention to a proposal for a Drupal Analytics project for Summer of Code 2009: http://groups.drupal.org/node/20452

We are gathering ideas, so come share your thoughts!

The time you've all been waiting for has arrived! As of yesterday students started adding projects to the Official Summer of Code site, and so if you're planning on participating as either a student or mentor, it's time to get a-rollin'!

If you're a student that wants to work on Drupal projects for the summer of code, you should:

• sign up for accounts on both drupal.org and groups.drupal.org
• either locate a proposal that interests you on the Summer of Code group, or add your own idea as a discussion on the Summer of Code group
• if you're interested in a community proposal you should comment on that proposal's discussion to let the community know you're going to put up a proposal
• add the proposals you're interested in to the Official Summer of Code site. IMPORTANT: you can only work on one Summer of Code project per summer, however you can add as many applications as you want and more than one student can add the same basic proposal (though only one proposal will be accepted for each specific idea)
• if you're adopting a community proposal you also should consider creating your own discussion where you work within this site to clarify and perfect your proposal.

If you're interested in mentoring a SoC project, you should:

• sign up to the Summer of Code 2009 Mentors group
• apply to be a mentor on the the Official Summer of Code site (see instructions below in the comments)
• review ideas, create ideas, and most importantly, help the students navigate through the often choppy community waters here.
• if you're interested mentoring one of the proposed ideas you should comment on that proposal's discussion to let students know that mentors are willing to work with them

Also- if you need to reach me and can't find me in the #drupal irc channel, please feel free to send me an e-mail (alex at zivtech) or through my contact form.

What's up designers? As some of you may know I'm heading up the google summer of code this year for Drupal (for background on the GSoC see: http://drupal.org/google-summer-of-code/2009 ). I'm not sure what big items need to get created in order to make Drupal theming more awesomer, which is why I'm asking for your help!

We absolutely have to have a design related project in this year's Summer of Code! (Obviously just my opinion, but I think it's very, very important) In order for that to happen we need ideas for projects, and the window to get the projects in is pretty short. So- who wants to help get some major design work done for Drupal? All you have to do is go to http://drupal.org/google-summer-of-code/2009 and create a discussion with your idea.

And remember, not only might we get some killer Design features from a student's work, but we might find a design-oriented webchick out there!

Any ideas?

The "HOWTO" and "General Requirements" documents have been posted on the group page for Google Summer of Code 2009.

There are a number of proposals from last year that either didn't make the cut or, in a couple of rare cases, didn't result in a successful project. Are there proposals from the GSoC 2008 group that worth bringing over the GSoC 2009 group? I'm going to put some work in organizing the group, and I was thinking it might be a good way to populate the idea section with some content.

Here's the list from last year: http://drupal.org/google-summer-of-code/2008/ideas-list

Background

Ok, this is going to get me into trouble, but nevertheless:

Christian Weilbach, long-time KDE developer, has posted a lengthy critique of Google's intentions with the GSoC on his blog (which is running on Drupal, btw). The lack of paragraph usage makes it a bit hard to read, hopefully that'll be fixed soon, but nonetheless I find it very worth the read, even if one doesn't necessarily need to agree with his point of view.

The following is my first revision of a proposal to create a search API module. I'd love to get some feedback.

Project Details
A Drupal search API would allow for separation between the search interface that end users interact and the back-end indexing and retrieval work that a search engine performs. The advantages to creating a search API are: