Seminar: Philip Johnson, "Make money, win friends, and influence people: how to participate in Google's Summer of Code" (2/19/2009)

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with several open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period. Historically, the program has brought together over 1,500 students with over 130 open source projects to create millions of lines of code.

Google Summer of Code has several goals:

• Get more open source code created and released for the benefit of all;
• Inspire young developers to begin participating in open source development;
• Help open source projects identify and bring in new developers and committers;
• Provide students in Computer Science and related fields the opportunity to do work related to their academic pursuits (think "flip bits, not burgers");
• Give students more exposure to real-world software development scenarios (e.g., distributed development, software licensing questions, mailing-list etiquette).

Students in Google Summer of Code are paid $4500 for the summer. 

And get a cool t-shirt.

One of my research projects, Hackystat, was a participant in Google Summer of Code 2008 and we sponsored four students.  In this talk, I will provide a brief introduction to GSoC with the hope that some of you will participate in the program.  With over 100 projects to choose from, there is likely to be a match with your professional and/or research interests.