SoC 2009

I saw this awesome promotional video about why students should take part in the Google Summer of Code. If you're a student and you're wondering whether or not to take part in this program or a mentor trying to convince a student to sign up, give this video a look.

http://csdl.ics.hawaii.edu/~johnson/screencasts/GSoC2009.mov

In the conversation that started the planning for the Google Summer of Code 2009 webchick presented what she saw as the biggest challenge the Drupal community faces:

IMO our challenge is not "how do we get these students to continue slaving away on their projects after they're not getting paid anymore" (I realize this isn't what you said, but I've heard other people say this if you 'read between the lines'), our challenge is instead, "how do we get our students to become Drupal-obsessed and immersed in the community as a contributor?" If we figure out the answer to that question, awesome code will follow.

Obviously, this challenge is also an opportunity, because for every person who we never hear from again (or for every dozen) we get a webchick that emerges to become a leader in, or at least a long-time member of, the community. It may be hard to keep people engaged, but the simple fact is that we already largely have their attention. We simply need to find more efficient and sustainable ways of making the contact more valuable to the participants, and make the memories more endearing/enduring.

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

Project page is http://drupal.org/node/236461

This project was never finished in 2008, and we would like to invite people to continue work on it in 2009 SoC.

Chart style plug-ins for Views module: http://drupal.org/node/236453

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!