Plone Foundation opens registration for Google Summer of Code 2007

For the second consecutive year, Google has approved the Plone Foundation as a participating organization in their Summer of Code development program. If you're interested in getting paid to write Plone code, or to help out with mentoring our students, read on.

Google Summer of Code, currently in its third year, is a program run by Google that offers cash to students who spend a few weeks during the summer working on open source projects. The aim is to get more people involved in Plone, and give students experience working on real project. If possible, features will be considered for merging in a future release of Plone (most like 3.5), but this is not an explicit requirement.

Students are paired up with mentors, who should be experienced Plone developers or other contributors to the community. Mentors are there to help students understand the community and align their efforts with those of the wider project. Depending on the type of student and project, the mentor may have more or less hands-on involvement.

Potential students and mentors should read the Summer of Code FAQ

If you are a student and want to improve Plone

If you are a full-time or part-time student, you can apply to participate in the program. You will be able to get $4500 for completing a project.

Also see these helpful entries in the Summer of Code FAQ:

So how do you get started?

  1. Start now! You have less than 10 days to get your application in and get approved (March 24th).
  2. Read our ideas list, or bring your own ideas. We're more likely to accept applications that are related to the ideas list, but if you have a good suggestion on something else that will make Plone better, we're all ears.
  3. Sign up as a Summer of Code student with your proposed project
  4. Sign up to the GSoC Students mailing list.

If you want to help mentor our students

The Summer of Code is important for Plone Foundation; not only do we get to improve Plone while paying people for it, it's also an excellent way to recruit new developers to the Plone community. Additionally, for each student successfully mentored, the Plone Foundation is awarded $500.

If you have knowledge of Plone and are willing to spend a couple of hours per week helping out one of our students, please sign up as a mentor. From previous experience, it's the number of mentors we can recruit that will limit our participation — there's always a lot of students, but not as many mentors.

To sign up as a mentor:

  1. Make sure you have a Google Account (Gmail or similar, you can always set up forwarding in Gmail if you don't want to keep your Summer of Code mail there)
  2. Sign up as a mentor (remember to check Plone Foundation in the list)
  3. Sign up to the GSoC Mentors mailing list and the aforementioned GSoC Students mailing list.
  4. Read the Mentoring how-to.
  5. Collect drinks, beer and instant karma from your fellow Plone developers at the next Plone Conference. :)

What is the timeline?

  • March 14: Student application period opens
  • March 24: Student application deadline, Plone Foundation starts ranking applications
  • April 9: List of accepted student applications published on code.google.com
  • May 28: Students begin coding for their GSoC projects; Google begins issuing initial student payments
  • July 9: Mid-term evaluations of student contributions
  • July 16: Mid-term evaluation deadline; Google issues mid-term student payments
  • August 20: Final evaluations of the contributed code
  • August 31: Final evaluation deadline; Google issues student and mentoring organization payments