Google Summer of Code 2009

["Matthew M. Burke" <matthew@...>]

Google has announced that they will run the Summer of Code program again 
this summer (2009).  Details can be found at 
http://code.google.com/soc/2008/.  In a nutshell: university students 
from around the world will submit proposals to develop software for one 
of a number of open source software projects.  The various oss projects 
provide the mentoring and Google provides cash stipends to the students 
(there is also a small payment per mentor).

Last year the Lua community applied to be one of the mentoring 
organizations.  Although not accepted, there were a number of student 
projects for various mentoring organizations that used Lua.

Specific dates have not been decided, but we're looking at roughly 
beginning of March for submitting an application to be a mentoring 
organization.  Last year, Jim Whitehead guided the process of submitting 
the application.  Due to prior commitments, Jim is not able to organize 
things this year.  I'm willing to do so (or would be quite happy for 
somebody else to volunteer!).

If you are interested (and no commitment needed now), the two important 
things to work on now are to

1. Develop a list of possible projects.  Mentoring organizations propose 
various projects for students to work on, although students are allowed 
(and depending on the mentoring organization encouraged) to propose 
their own ideas.

Last year's ideas pages can be found at 
http://lua-users.org/wiki/GoogleSummerOfCodeIdeas.  Feel free to add and 
edit.

2. Begin working on our application to be a mentoring organization.  A 
working draft from last year is at 
http://lua-users.org/wiki/GoogleSummerOfCodeMentoringApplication.  There 
will most likely be a fair amount of overlap between the questions on 
last year's application and this year's.

Matt