Google’s Summer of Code’s Global Outreach
Posted: September 22, 2009
Udai Gupta attended Google's Summer of Code 2009./Image courtesy of Udai Gupta
By Lauren Fritsky
Udai Gupta had his pick of mentoring organizations when he applied to Google’s Summer of Code last spring.
But one in particular stood out to the recent graduate of LNM Institute of Information Technology, India—the Grameen Foundation, a global organization working to end poverty through microfinance. Gupta worked with the Mifos Initiative, an Open Source information technology platform built by Grameen, in an effort to help microfinance institutions better deliver financial services to the poor. “The only reason why I chose Mifos above all other great projects was the mission associated with it,” he says. “Working for Mifos during my summer, I can say that the Mifos community is the most supportive community I have ever found, especially to its new members.”
Mifos is one of many projects successfully completed during Google Summer of Code, which introduces college and pre-college students to Free and Open Source software development. The program turned five this year and had its most successful season yet, according to Leslie Hawthorn, who manages the program.
Changes to the Program
Nearly 2,000 mentors and 1,000 students worked to improve the code bases of 150 projects, with about 85 percent receiving passing final evaluations, up a full two percent from 2008.
Google has made several changes to the program in recent years. First, it capped this year’s number of global student participants at 1,000 (it was 1,125 last year) to lessen the workload for mentors. The program also implemented a community bonding period that gives students more time to get to know their mentors and the lay of the Open Source land before they start coding. Google is also now using a different code base to manage the program, called Melange, which allows others to use the Google model to run their own Summer of Code initiatives. “For several years, we had folks come to us and say, ‘We’re very excited about Summer of Code and its model, and we’d like to do something like it in our community or a region,’” Hawthorn says. “They wanted to use our infrastructure, but everything we did for the program was tied into our back end. We couldn’t open it to people … It’s an easily replaceable model that’s been show to be effective. Now people have the tools to do it.”
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