While Google hasn't officially announced anything to my knowledge, word on the street is that the Summer of Code program will be running again in 2009. If it runs as it did in 2008, then it would be publicly announced next month, and applications from mentoring organizations (that's us - Drupal) to participate will be due the first week of March (just in time for everyone to be distracted by Drupalcon! ;)).

Traditionally, I've sort of headed up the administrative, getting-the-ball-rolling process at the beginning of SoC, and making-sure-things-are-chugging-along during the middle, with the help of Drupal's tremendous mentoring team. There is one BIG snag this year though -- last fall I got named Drupal 7 core maintainer, and have had to cut all other "extra-curricular" duties, and that includes SoC. :\ We therefore urgently need to look at a sustainable way to spread this responsibility across the mentoring team so it doesn't create a "single point of failure" in our organization.

So let's pre-preemptively start talking strategy about how to tackle managing SoC moving forward. Here's a brain-dump of everything related to managing SoC that will need to be looked after, preferably by a team of former mentors, students, and ardent summer of code fans.

Want to help? Sign yourself up!