Development [LWN.net]

Interview: Leslie Hawthorn on the 2009 Google Summer of Code

By Forrest Cook
September 11, 2009

LWN last talked to Leslie Hawthorn, Google's Open Source Program Coordinator, in September, 2007 about the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). GSoC is a project where Google pays students to work with a mentor to write open-source code. The 2009 Google Summer of Code recently concluded, marking the end of the project's fifth year. The official end of project summary, Wrapping Our Fifth Google Summer of Code, covers this year's effort:

"The sun has set on our fifth year of introducing college and university students to Free and Open Source software development, and what a year it's been! Just under 2000 mentors and 1000 students began working together to improve the code bases of 150 projects, and we're pleased to let folks know that 85 percent of our student participants have received passing final evaluations, up a full two percent over 2008 and our best success rate to date."

The List of all accepted organizations shows the many participating and planned projects, source code from the GSoC projects is available there.

LWN: Greetings, Could you tell us about yourself and your role with the Google Summer of Code?

L. Hawthorn:

I'm the Program Manager for Google Summer of Code and have been running the program since 2006. In addition to setting the schedule and giving guidance to all of the FLOSS projects involved on how to most effectively mentor their students, etc., I'm also responsible for putting on our annual Mentor Summit. At these annual conferences, which have been happening since 2007, folks from all of our diverse projects get together and spend a weekend determining how to collaboratively make Open Source work better.

There are some statistics from 2005-2007 of the at the end of the previously mentioned LWN article, could you fill in the statistics for 2008 and 2009?

Google Summer of Code 2009

1000 students
150 open source mentoring organizations
70 countries
$5,000,000 approximate budget
85% overall student evaluation success rate
Approximately 2000 mentors

Google Summer of Code 2008

1125 students
175 open source mentoring organizations
90 countries
$5,000,000 approximate budget
83% overall student evaluation success rate
Approximately 1500 mentors

Have there been any changes to the program this year?

This year, we have run the program using Melange as the infrastructure to run the GSoC website. The software is Open Source, Apache licensed and runs on Google App Engine. Anyone can make use of the code base to run their own GSoC like program and we're very excited to offer this software to the community since we had many requests in the past for people to be able to use our code to run their own mentoring programs. People can take a look at the code base and contribute feedback and patches by visiting code.google.com/p/soc/.

Has the economic downturn had any effect on the GSoC?

We've certainly heard from our mentors that they had less time to spend on the program than they had hoped and more than a few cited the need to work longer hours or spend more time searching for contract work as a reason their time was constrained.

We scaled back the size program a bit this year, taking on about 100 fewer students, but that was about making the program the right size - not stretching mentor resources too thinly - rather than economic constraints. We were happy to have the same budget once again in 2009 as we did for 2008.

We also sent out a slightly less expensive start of program gift, offering students an ACM membership rather than a coding related tome like Producing Open Source Software or Beautiful Code. The beautiful part of this gift was that it not only allowed us to save funds for the program - which were reallocated to student travel scholarships - but to reduce our environmental impact by not shipping 1000 packages out to 70 countries. Our students were really excited by the ACM memberships and we plan to keep offering these to our student participants in the future.

Are there plans to run the GSoC program again in 2010?

We certainly plan to do so, but won't have more certain announcements until early next year.

Could you tell us where we could find more information on the accomplishments made during this year's GSoC?

We published this report from the Grameen Foundation yesterday.

And there should be a post forthcoming today on all the universities that student participants attended over the last five years today on the Open Source Blog.

Links to actual source code should now be available from each organization home page on the GSoC 2009 site by clicking on that project's name on the full project list.

Your readers can expect reports from at least MoinMoin, The Perl Foundation, SIP Communicator and Etherboot in the next two weeks to be published there as well.

Are there any outstanding efforts by students and/or mentors that you would like to mention?

Well, I tend to think all of our mentors and students are pretty spectacular. One story that sticks out in my mind is that of Anna Granudd from the Systers project. Anna returned to engineering after a hiatus. While Anna hasn't shared all details I get the impression that she, like many women in the technical fields, was initially discouraged by those close to her from pursuing engineering as a profession. She's now studying Mechanical Engineering and some Python but CS was not her main focus for either academics or personally.

She dived right into coding for the Systers project to make things happen and the overall community experiences better for all the women involved in this global network for women in technology. The best part of all is Anna's stories of not being able to go to sleep because she's having too much fun coding. Needless to say, that's the hallmark of a good programmer.

Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers about the Google Summer of Code program?

As mentioned in this blog post, the most important thing that students who would like to participate in GSoC can do is to begin exploring Open Source now. Our most successful students are those who make early contact with their mentors and begin creating relationships within their project communities that later help support their coding efforts.

Thank you for your time.

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