openSUSE seeks ideas for Google Summer of Code

In recent years, many open source people have gravitated away from Google, but while Google’s history may have some shady areas that conflict with open source ideals and philosophy, not all parts of the abc.xyz conglomerate are bad.

It’s open source projects prove it has a genuine interest in contributing to and emboldening open source.

The most encouraging of its projects that embolden open source is its Google Summer of Code.

GSoC 2014 had the highest amount of open source organizations selected with 190. A concerning statistic that stands out in last year’s GSoC is that it accepted the fewest amount of open source projects since 2007. Let us hope a lowering trend like this does not continue and that it is not from the lack of open source projects submitting fewer GSoC applications.

Why? Because the world needs mentors and open source needs more code.

Mentoring is important for the future of open source software and for openSUSE. It introduces students to the culture and practices of open source. It can provide lessons for building interpersonal skills and the results of GSoC produce open-source code, which benefits everyone.

openSUSE is actively searching for mentors, students and projects for GSoC as well as administrators for openSUSE’s involvement with GSoC.

Students are matched with a mentoring organizations like openSUSE and given projects to work on over a three-month period, but project ideas must be submitted for openSUSE to take part in GSoC. Ideas can be submitted to openSUSE on the wiki under the GSoC ideas 2016 page. Students can also submit ideas on the page and if accepted as a GSoC project, they can do something technically challenging and use theoretical knowledge from university studies to solve real world problems.

Administrators start the GSOC process and submit proposals for the mentoring organization using the ideas generated from the page. Administrators submit the application to Google between Feb. 8 and Feb. 20.

Be a mentor because we need people involved with openSUSE to make a difference in people’s’ lives and in open source.

To better understand what it takes to be a GSoC mentor, read What Makes a good Mentor?