openSUSE to Mentor Six Google Summer of Code Students

Google made an announcement April 22 that 1,206 students were selected for the Google Summer of Code and six of those students will be mentored through the openSUSE Project, which is one of 178 mentoring organizations in this year’s GSoC.

The six university students will spend their summer break writing code and learning about open source developments through six projects with the openSUSE Project while earning money through Google’s international program.

“I believe that one of the most important tasks for a Free Software hacker is to bring new people with new perspectives, backgrounds and fresh ideas into the community,” said Hendrik Vogelsang, who is one of the mentors for the openSUSE Project. “GSoC provides the perfect opportunity for a project like openSUSE to build new relationships with students from all over the world.”

Those new relationships and fresh ideas will develop within six projects for openSUSE, which are titled Alternatives YaST Module, Enhancing visitor experience of OSEM, Implementing Ticket payment feature for OSEM, Improve One-Click Installer, Improve the UI of Portus and Port Jangouts from AngularJS 1.4.

Students wrote more than 20 project proposals to participate with openSUSE as a mentoring organization. A list of available project that were available to students can be viewed at 101.opensuse.org.

The next phase of GSoC will be the Community Bonding phase and the students will begin working on the projects May 23. The students will have a mid-term evaluation between June 20 - 27 and will submit their code for evaluation between August 15 -23.

Google Summer of Code is open to post-secondary students, age 18 and older in most countries.