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I was very excited to see that the OSUOSL was accepted to participate as a mentoring organization in this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program. This gives us a great opportunity to work with students not only at Oregon State University, but at schools worldwide and help them to get involved with some great Open Source communities.

If you are not familiar with GSoC, I would recommend checking out the official google website for the program. The basic idea is that Google sponsors students (to the tune of $4500/each, plus $500/each student goes to the mentoring organization) to work on Open Source projects for the summer. This is great for a number of reasons: first of all, it gets a LOT of code written. Secondly, it attracts a lot of new contributors to many Open Source projects with the hope that they will continue working with the project even after the summer is over. If you are student interested in participating in GSoC, check out the mentoring organizations listed here, and specifically, the OSL would love to have people work on some of the ideas we have posted on our GSoC ideas page. Remember, you are not limited to the ideas that are listed, if you have a cool idea, bring it up with us on our IRC channel (#osuosl on irc.freenode.net).

Last year, I participated as a GSoC mentor for the Fedora Project. It was a great experience and opened my eyes to what a wonderful project GSoC is, both for the mentoring organizations and for the students. I'm very excited to participate again this year, and I look forward to seeing some fun student projects!