Flip Bits, Not Burgers!

The Google Summer of Code is an annual program, which pays students to write code for Open Source projects. It gives a chance for college students to hack on really cool stuff and learn a lot in the process. openSUSE regularly participates of the Google Summer of Code, and has benefited greatly from it. In the 2012 edition of the program, openSUSE participated with 12 projects, 9 completed successfully. This year we once again hope to participate. Read on to find out how to participate!

Google works with open source organizations to shortlist students based on their proposals. A mentor from the community helps the student in their work, and provides the necessary direction. As always, openSUSE hopes to be part of this year’s edition of Google’s Summer of Code. However, we need mentors, students and cool ideas! This is a call for mentors and students to join us and help a new student make progress on Open Source projects.

Students

We do expect students to put in some serious effort in ahead of the GSOC project as well as after. Experience contributing to Free Software projects and openSUSE in particular is a big plus and we prefer to support students who are already active contributors over those who are not. So, if you’re interested in a GSOC, start setting up your PC for development, begin talking to potential mentors and get your paws wet!

You can have a look at our GSoC page for more information. You can find the ideas page for 2013 GOSC projects here. You can also look at the ideas page for 2012 containing a large number of projects started last year. Some of them turned into successful projects, the others might still be available!

We list potential mentors for the project. You can ping them for more information and start interacting with the community. We are more than happy to help!

Mentors

We are looking for project ideas for this year’s program. If you have a ‘world-changing’ idea, feel free to add it to the list. Even if you are not able to volunteer for mentoring, we will try to find mentors for the ideas.

We have till 17th of March to submit our organization’s proposal for this year’s program so if you’re able and willing to help, please put your name and your idea on the wiki as soon as you can!

Contact the team

You can find out all about our GSoC programme on the wiki or contact the GSoC team for further questions

• Matt Barringer

• Manu Gupta

• Saurabh Sood

They usually hang out on IRC at #opensuse-project on Freenode.

Article contributed by Saurabh Sood, kindly edited by _Anditosan