Applying for Google Summer of Code `07
Posted by hatim
These are interesting times to be an open source developer. Google Sumer of code enters its third year in 2007 and this time the process has started earlier than previous years. As I am registered as part time certificate course student at Virtual university of Pakistan, I can take part in this competition. I have used open source for around seven years now and have yet to give back some thing solid to the open source community (occasional irc help secessions and little bit of wiki editing is good but not a very big contribution in my opinion). I feel that if I am able to be a part of Google summer of code this year, not only I would be giving back to the community in a structured way, but I would also be learning a lot from seasoned hackers and developers who would be mentoring me.
I am not certain what mentoring organizations are expecting in an application. I don't think the mentors should be expecting the participants to know a lot about their project as the whole point of SOC is to make new people come into open source development. But at the same time if some one has worked with the project in question in the past (s/he may be part of code project team and a student as well), that person would be a better catch. As for me I am applying to the projects which are of technical/intellectual interest to me or solve some important problem that I have encountered.
I will be posting a few apps within next 24 hours. I will try to supplement them with web pages on this site. I hope at least this application process will be a good experience for me to polish my writing skills.
