Feels Like Summer

Posted by Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

After a busy year running Google Summer of Code, hosting community conferences, adding new features to our project hosting site, and helping transform the Google Web Toolkit into an open source project, our team has finally had a chance to clear out the old inbox and catch up on the news.

And the news is awesome! All over the world, programs are springing up to get students involved in open source:

GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program: On top of mentoring 20 students for GSoC, GNOME funded six additional developer projects in Summer 2006, all by women. The GNOME journal has more information.

The OCaml Summer Project: To encourage growth in its developer community, Jane Street Capital will fund OCaml student projects this summer and then bring the students together in New York City at the close of the program.

Season of Usability: Student developers from several countries are working with mentors to improve usability in Inkscape, KDE and more.

Winter of Code: Korean games publisher NCsoft just finished taking applications for their program in late December. We look forward to hearing about the results of their efforts to get students from middle school through university level involved in open source development. (Note: The Winter of Code program site is in Korean, but feel free to try an English translation. If you would like to read more about the Winter of Code in English, ZDNet Asia has further details.)

We've also heard that the MySQL folks are planning their own Winter of Code program.

Heard about other programs like these? We'd love to hear from you!

Note: Post updated to correctly attribute sponsorship of the OCaml project to Jane's Capital.