Google Summer of Code: The students become the teachers

Over the last few weeks we have been posting a collection of numbers on this year’s Google Summer of Code program. Now we’d like to look at the number of past students who return to participate as mentors in the program. The numbers clearly indicate that many students become active contributors in various open source communities after their projects conclude; in Google Summer of Code terms we could call this transition graduation.

Some numbers on the student to mentor transition to consider:

• 61 current mentors participated as students last year and for 37 of that group, 2011 was their first Google Summer of Code experience. 
• 131 of this year’s mentors have worked on their own student projects in at least one past Google Summer of Code. 

This is a very respectable result and shows that more than 11.5% of this year's 1,121 mentors with assigned projects have experienced the program from both perspectives.

Below is a detailed table showing how many former students, who participated in particular editions of the program, are currently mentoring a project for Google Summer of Code 2012.

Student 2009	Student 2010	Student 2011	Mentor 2012
		X	X	37
	X		X	29
X			X	29
	X	X	X	17
X		X	X	1
X	X		X	12
X	X	X	X	6

The table shows that 95 of the mentors participated as students only once; 30 more became mentors having worked on two student projects. There were 6 students who converted to mentorship after three consecutive years as students. These numbers also show that for a large number of students Google Summer of Code is not a one-time adventure. There are many who return to implement new projects by themselves or to give a hand to other students and mentor their work. Let’s hope this trend will continue for as long as the program continues to run!

By Daniel Hans, Google, Melange Developer

Important note: all the statistics are calculated based on data gathered since 2009. Previous editions are not taken into consideration.

Five Years of Summer Love in Chicago

Google Summer of Code is in full swing and, besides all the coding, participants are also organizing meetups all over the world. These meetups allow Google Summer of Code students and mentors to meet in person and talk about the awesome contributions they will be making to open source projects over the summer.

Nathaniel Manista welcomes Chicago-area students to Google’s Chicago offices

One of the longest-running meetups is the one held each spring in Chicago. This meetup started in 2008 after five University of Chicago students were accepted to Google Summer of Code. The university’s ACM Student Chapter approached Google’s Chicago office about hosting a meetup for them, which was attended by around 30 students.

The following year, we opened up the event to students in all of Chicago’s major universities and since then, the Chicago meetup has been getting bigger and bigger each year. A few weeks ago, we held the fifth annual Chicago-area meetup and we had more than 160 students sign up for it!

As usual, the meetup revolved around a series of lightning talks delivered by accepted Google Summer of Code students and by Google engineers. Google Chicago hosts the event, providing dinner for all attendees. The dinner’s theme seems to change every year and, as a Spaniard, I was thrilled to walk into Google Chicago’s conference room this year to find big trays of paella, croquetas, and flan waiting for me.

Jacob Walker shares details on his upcoming summer work for Shogun

This year, four of the Google Summer of Code students that attended the meetup gave lightning talks on their upcoming summer work:

• Marek Chmiel, working for Wine on “Implementing a DSS provider”
• Guru Devalna, working for SymPy on “Density Operators for Quantum Module in sympy.physics.quantum”
• Meg Ford, working for GNOME on “GNOME Documents UIs for Viewing and Editing of File Metadata”
• Jacob Walker, working for Shogun on “Implementing Gaussian Process Regession in Shogun”

We also had a chance to hear from several Google engineers who shared some interesting (and often amusing) perspectives on various topics:

• Robin Anil, a former Google Summer of Code student himself, told us about doing machine learning on a mammoth scale with Apache Mahout.
• J.J. Lueck told us about the awesome stuff the Data Liberation Front is up to.
• Nathaniel Manista, our gracious host for the evening, told us about inheritance, and why he no longer uses it.
• Jeremy Wall told us about some of his favorite idioms in Go.

J.J. Lueck tells students about the Data Liberation Front

As usual, a great time was had by all. Many thanks to Google for continuing to host this event, and congratulations to all the Chicago-area students who will be participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code!


By Borja Sotomayor, Lecturer, University of Chicago and Google Summer of Code Organization Administrator (Globus Alliance, 2008-2011)

Google Ideas develops citizen engagement pilot project for Somalia

When a country is unable to hold regular elections, how do people make their voices heard? That’s the challenge today in Somalia, which hasn’t had a permanent government since 1991. Somalia is in the middle of drafting a new provisional constitution which will be ratified later this summer, and with this process has come new opportunities to increase citizen engagement.

As the draft constitution has undergone revisions in recent months, Google Ideas developed a pilot project with the Somali service, Africa Division of Voice of America (VOA) to help Somalis register their opinions. Using Google App Engine, Google Voice, and Google Docs, we built an internal site for VOA to conduct public opinion polling:

Starting in April, with just a few clicks, VOA pollsters could call and survey Somalis for their thoughts on a new constitution, asking questions such as: Should there be a strong central government? Should Sharia law be the basis of the constitution? And should there be a requirement that women be included as elected officials? Over three rounds of polling, VOA used the internal site to collect the survey results. The last round concluded last week, and VOA published the aggregate results on its public Somali site, as well as broadcast them across the country on its new radio program, “Constitution Square.”

We’re pleased to make this small contribution in helping Somalis participate as they draft a new constitution, and hope that others might benefit from this as well. This open source project can be modified for use in any country or context, and anyone interested in downloading the source code can click here.

By Brendan Ballou and Yasmin Dolatabadi, Google Ideas

UCOSP Program Year 4

We have just completed our fourth year of the UCOSP (Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Projects) program and are already planning for a fifth. In this multi-university collaboration, students from across Canada - 13 schools this past year - participate in industry-mentored open source projects for course credit. Almost a year ago, we wrote an overview of the program including the practical details around the program organization and the rationale that led us to develop it. As a high-level description, suffice it to say that this unique program - to the best of our knowledge there is no similar program anywhere else in the world - was conceived to provide students with a very realistic experience of software engineering and to fundamentally enhance their school learning. The feedback we are getting from our students provides strong evidence that we are meeting these objectives.

Let me share a few stories from some of the 71 undergraduate students who participated this year:

"[UCOSP] was the first time I realized how a team located in different areas can integrate and work together. The IRC channel is the place we have the most fun.  I am very thankful to this project because I got an insight and have experienced  how an open-source project operates."

From another undergraduate whose UCOSP experience led to her Google summer internship:

"My UCOSP project was Groovy, a plugin for Eclipse that provides IDE support for the dynamically typed language Groovy. Some time after I started working on my UCOSP project, I applied to Google for a summer internship. After making it through the first round of technical interviews, I found myself being interviewed over the phone by a senior developer for Google. He asked, a little apprehensively, what I knew about Eclipse plugins. I described my work for UCOSP to him. He was audibly relieved - he was looking for someone to work on an Eclipse plugin that provides IDE support for JavaScript. I got a phone call with an offer an hour later and I'm working there now."

Another student comments on what he learned by reflecting through his learning experience:

"The most important things you learn during the project are about yourself: how disciplined you are, your time management skills and how to work independently. In particular, I've discovered that I need structure to be productive."

The project mentors have also commented positively on various aspects of the project. For example, the Umple project mentor comments on the use of Google tools for managing his distributed team.

"It is a nice fit that Google is a key sponsor of UCOSP: Umple's development is hosted on Google Code, and we make extensive use of Google Groups and Google+, particularly the excellent ‘Hangouts with extras' multi-party video conferencing feature. Weekly Hangouts turned out to be almost as effective as in-person meetings with my local students at fostering a sense of community among UCOSP students from several campuses." 

Finally, one of the home-faculty members whose student was on the ReviewBoard team, says:

"...[my student] had a fantastic experience with UCOSP. He doesn't understand why all of the students aren't beating down the doors trying to get into the course."

As a steering committee we are thrilled with the continued success of UCOSP and are happy to talk to anyone about it. We want to thank Google for their support and to publicly thank the dedicated open source project mentors who are training tomorrow's leaders. For all of us who are involved with UCOSP, it is clear that this is a valuable program for our students and that our projects make useful, even valuable, contributions to the open-source projects that participate in it. We are excited to be planning our next year and we are thankful to the sponsorship of our supporting organizations.

By Karen Reid, Senior Lecturer University of Toronto, UCOSP Steering Committee Member