 So the last of our talks today is not being presented by a student per se, but is about a program that is highly relevant to students who are into free and open source software, the Google Summer of Code. It's being presented by the coordinator of the Google Summer of Code from the Google Open Source Programs Office, Carol Smith. Please make a welcome. Hi everybody. Thank you for the introduction. If any of you are familiar with the Google Summer of Code program, I'm actually, my predecessor's name was Leslie Hawthorne, as was mentioned earlier, and so I am the new Google Summer of Code coordinator. I've been in the open source programs office about a year now at Google. I've actually been at Google about five and a half years, but I moved into the OSPO in March of last year. This is only my second Summer of Code. So anyway, how many of you have heard of the Summer of Code program? Wow, that's awesome. I love this place so much. You guys are great. I go into rooms in other places and nobody raises a hand, and I feel it's so heartwarming that you guys know about this program. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about Summer of Code because I'm sure there's probably some people in the room at least who aren't familiar with it, but then I'll sort of give you some interesting tasty stats and stuff and some information about the program this year because just yesterday we announced that we are in fact running the program for 2011, which is great, and so we can talk about the program for this year. So what is GSOC? GSOC is a program that encourages students to work in open source software, essentially. It's an online global program and students are paid a stipend over the winter to work on a project for an open source organization. Google, at the beginning of the summer, chooses. Last year it was 150 organizations. We choose open source organizations that we partner with who provide mentors for students to work on a project over the summertime, and students are given, it's very much like submitting a regular proposal for a college course. You submit a proposal at the start of the summer, winter, and the mentoring organization will choose the proposals they want to mentor, and then students are given a midterm and a final evaluation, and in exchange they're given a stipend for the work that they're doing. And hopefully what basically happens here is, and what we like to encourage is that the students get involved in the open source community and start to work more and more with the open source community even outside of the project and the program. And so we're trying to encourage more students to work in open source software and become regular contributors to the project that they worked with. I've heard a lot of students say that they were already working in open source and isn't it great that they could get paid to do a project that they would have done for free anyway. And that's awesome. So I kind of went over a lot of this already, but basically we are getting more open source code into the world, which is a great thing, and we're getting more students introduced to open source software in general. And oh by the way, students are getting paid to work on these projects, so that's all awesome. Does anybody know about the history of summer of code? I can talk about that a little. So this is actually Larry Page's idea. I'm sure all of you know this, but all of the servers in all of the world that are running Google are running a Linux distribution right now. And so Larry Page decided we should start giving back to our open source compatriots and getting more students involved in open source and thought that was kind of the genesis of the program, giving students something to do over the summertime. A lot of students get college credit, university credit for participating in this program as well, so in addition to getting paid for it, they also get college credit, which is great. And we also try to, we also give back to the organizations as well in the form of giving them a stipend for each student that they mentor as well. So not only do these organizations get more code produced for them, hopefully they get new developers into their community, and we also give them some money for the hard, hard work that they do mentoring these students. It is not an easy job being a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code. It's a very time and energy intensive process and it's really a labor of love. So we announced GSOC 2011 just yesterday, and these are some important dates for you. Starting on February 28th, we're going to be accepting applications for mentoring organizations. In years previous, we've only had a week for mentoring organizations to apply. This year, we're giving everyone two weeks. I got some feedback that people would have liked a little bit more time, so we're extending that a little longer this year. So they have until March 11th to apply. Another thing that we're trying to do this year is encourage smaller open source organizations who maybe are not quite as established in the community as our larger, you know, Apache Software Foundation, Python Software Foundation to apply as well. We're trying to get more new, interesting organizations to participate in Summer of Code this year. And so we're kind of floating the idea around of trying to get smaller organizations that have just started in the open source community to also participate in GSOC this year and see if they can get some benefit from GSOC as well. So then on March 14th, so in the interim time between March 11th and March 14th, hopefully students are talking to their potential mentoring organizations about project proposals that they like to do. And then starting on March 14th, students can start applying. Oh, sorry, sorry. March 14th is when we review applications. March 18th, we announce organizations. Between March 18th and March 28th, hopefully students are talking to their potential mentoring organizations about what projects they'd like to work on. And then starting March 28th is when the applications open for student project proposals. And that it will also be a two week deadline. March, sorry, April 25th is when we announce accepted students. And between April 25th and May 23rd, we have what's called the community bonding period, which is essentially about a month of time when students get to basically talk to their organizations about their project in more detail, get familiar with the code base if they're not already and sort of get more integrated with the community before they actually have to start working on the project. We've also gotten feedback that some students don't actually get out of school until either early May or mid-May. And so this is actually helpful for them to not actually have to be trying to go to school and working on a GSoc project at the same time. And then May 23rd is basically when coding actually officially starts. Oh, that looks like it cut off at the bottom there. Sorry about that. July 15th, we have midterm evaluations for all the students. August 26th, final evaluations. And we announce that following week what our pass rate was. I won't go into too much detail since I've already talked about this, but basically students are paid. You're given $500 as a student for being accepted into the program. And then if you successfully complete your midterm evaluation, you're given $2,250. And if you successfully complete your final evaluation, you're given $2,250. So wide range of projects, obviously we had 150 organizations last year from across the board. We have large umbrella organizations like I mentioned like the Apache Software Foundation who kind of have students, GSoc students who work on projects for them. And then they provide sort of this umbrella organization for other smaller organizations to participate in GSoc who might not have been accepted already. And then we also have other organizations like we had a DreamWidth and a whole Sisters was participated last year, a whole wide range of open source projects. I think this is kind of obvious, but sometimes it's hard to convince students why they should participate. But hopefully getting involved in an open source community over the summer, if that's not enough of an incentive, you also get a real world experience working with an organization and committing code and getting feedback on your code and actually working on a project at a kid on a mailing list, which some people are actually not familiar with. And this can be very helpful. And you get a stipend and you get to work online in your PJs on your project, which is pretty awesome. So it's a pretty good deal, I think. Then again, maybe my opinion is biased since I run the program. So these are some cool stats for you, tasty statistics. 2005 we had 400 students, which in 2009 we had a thousand students. I have 2010 on the next slide, so don't worry about that. We went from 40 organizations to 150 in 2009. And we had an 85% success rate in 2009. And so this is actually an interesting, more interesting pie chart than you might think. So this is a breakdown of countries that participated and that were accepted students for summer of code. So that green one is the US, the purple one is India. But this one is actually the one, this green one over here is a really interesting one, Sri Lanka actually came up on the list this year in the top 10 of countries participating. So I think they are the country to watch here. I was pretty amazed and I think that's awesome that they have a big open source effort in Sri Lanka right now. This big blue blob over here is basically all the other countries that are not in the top 10. But this basically the right half of that pie chart is the top six countries that participated. Unfortunately you can't see the very bottom of this. We had over 3,400 students submit over 5,500 proposals of which we accepted 1,026 in 2010. And we had 150 organizations, 69 countries represented by students. We actually had slightly more than that represented by mentors but that's just students. And an 89% success rate which is our best year yet which is also awesome. And some useful links for you since we announced the program and we'd like you to spread the word. I hereby deem you all people who should spread the word. Google Melange is where we administer the whole program from. It's actually an open source effort that was created specifically to run the summer of code program and there are a whole bunch of student developers who work on this project. FAQs, it's a very long link but if you go to Google Melange it's linked off of there so you can check that out as well. We have a discussion list that has suddenly gotten very popular in the last couple of days since we announced the program so you might want to subscribe to that if you're interested in talking to people. And we also have an IRC channel on FreeNode as well. So thank you for your attention. Questions? Please wait for the microphone. Thank you. The graph that you showed showed that the one before that that you had a drop in 2009. Was that a conscious sort of reduction for management purposes? Yeah, so my understanding is that in 2008 we kind of decided to build the program up a little bit and in 2009 it kind of became clear that kind of the magic number was a thousand students. It sounded like 1125 was a little bit unwieldy and so yeah we purposefully dropped it back down just a little bit to make it a little easier to administer. What's kind of the biggest limitation? The fact that there's only one of me and I only have so much time in the day. We might actually be accepting more students than a thousand this year depending on the quality of the proposals but that will all depend but yeah it's mostly a limitation of time and energy and effort. And have the projects all been software related or have there been some that have been like hardware? Actually we had two open source hardware organizations participate this in 2010 one of which was Beagleboard and the other which I'm blanking on the name of. I'm sorry? No it wasn't somebody else Beagleboard and somebody else the the list is on forgive me but yes we did have two hard open source hardware organizations participate this year. Hi I was just curious what is your success rate on the number of students who passed their final evaluation so if you if you don't pass your midterm you're out of the program obviously and then the students who passed their midterms go on to the final and then of the students who passed the final that's how we that's how we figure out our success rate. Your success rate seems to be getting better you had 82, 82, 80, 83, 85 and the last one's 89 can ask why why it gets better what have you learned? I think there's a few reasons one is I think that the organizations over time have gotten a better understanding of how to choose the really strong proposals at the start of the year and a lot that we've gotten a lot of tribal knowledge about how to recognize a student proposal that might not be as as might not have as good a potential for success early on and the other is I think the organizations have gotten really good at sort of heading off problems at the past that if they have a student who's kind of on the border at the midterm and they pass them there's a lot of us more steps that the organizations have figured out that they can take to actually make sure a student is successful on their project overall. Anyone else? Yeah given that it's not actually our summer and there's going to be heaps of other things we're going to be doing in that time what sort of time contribution is necessary? Do you mean as an organization or as a student? As a student. So we generally advise students to treat this as a full-time job and that if they have something else big going on in their life that it's probably not a good idea to participate try and participate in Summer of Code as well. Having said that only each individual student can make the decision on how they want to divide their time and if they think that it's possible and it's also up to them to discuss their time commitments with the mentor and the organization and say I have this other thing going on or I'm trying to work a part-time job can I also do Summer of Code and you have to decide with the organization but our general rule of thumb is that you should assume that you're going to be working on this 40 hours a week. For how long? Four months? Three months so it goes where's my timeline? Yeah so basically from April 25th until end of August. So this could be a problem for a lot of Australian students though considering around April going on May you're heading into the real deep hours of study near your exam period. I don't have a solution to that problem I think each individual student needs to decide whether or not that they think that they can handle the time commitment. Would it perhaps be an interesting idea to split up your Summer of Code into two periods one based on the northern hemisphere and one for the southern hemisphere that way it can actually be an Australian summer of code? Yeah unfortunately I don't have the time or resources to run two Summer of Code programs so what what we've done now is is just this last year we ran the Google Code and program during our winter your summer but it's not intended for university students so there's limitations of that but we are now running two programs basically in the winter and the summer regardless of what hemisphere you're in so that's that's the solution we've come up with thus far. Go ahead. Microphone it's still a great project though. Thank you. Another gating factor is that it's very labor intensive for the projects and the mentors and while we've raised the issue of doing multiple periods throughout the year with our mentoring orgs I think two programs a year is about as much as they can do so. Yeah and we actually this year just got we only had 20 organizations who participated in Google Code in and we got a lot of feedback that even that even having done that right off of the tail of Summer of Code was incredibly time and resource intensive and it was hard to handle even doing that so. I would I would I heard just yesterday about GNOME running a program intended specifically for Southern Hemisphere students it was I think it was intended as an outreach to women in open source software but there are other organizations doing these kinds of things for and I would welcome more organizations to do more Summer of Code type programs that are more conducive to the Southern Hemisphere if that's if that's what you guys would like. Have you actually noticed I mean like what has the participation difference been between like the North and Southern Hemisphere? Has the safety. I have run the numbers and Australia comes in 20th in terms of overall participation over the last let's see one two three four six years so and I mean obviously there's all kinds of great talent down here and so thank you for making the extra effort. In terms of Northern versus Southern Hemisphere participation it is looking at it in terms of number of students relative to the overall population of Northern versus Southern Hemisphere the numbers are a little bit less relative to the population but not as much as you would expect. I don't know if that's because some of the countries in the Southern Hemisphere are on the same school calendar as the Northern Hemisphere. If you have any insight as to how that happens because frankly I expected it to be disappointing and I was pleasantly surprised. Do you have an SOC at a more global holiday time like over Christmas? Yeah I mean the title of the program is Summer of Code so we typically do it in our summer. But that's only for the US? It is it is a global program we have students from all over the world who participate. The reason why I ask is my son was interested in doing this. He's just left year 12 now and you've been having a father as a geek obviously I was encouraged but I did look into it and the amount of time he has and the time it's on makes it totally impractical for him whilst if you did it over Christmas which yes I realize it's called Summer of Code and you can only do one a year but why not do one that's more accessible worldwide. Well the answer is because right now the program that we're running over Christmas is Google Code in which is our sister program to Summer of Code which is for 13 to 18 year olds. So we're running two programs for everyone between 13 and 100 trying to get everybody involved in open source software all year long. Again the only answer I have to that is I have limitations of my time and effort and our mentoring organizations have limitations of their time and effort and so even running one Summer of Code every year is incredibly time consuming and resource insensitive. Thank you for saying that so I didn't have to. What's the pass rate between the two hemispheres? I have no idea. Yeah I've never crunched that number. Sorry in the American summer but if there were any Australians that were accepted into the program to just allow them to start at a different date? Yeah we've actually I've had a lot of discussions about the date and the timeline thing specifically even lots of countries in the northern hemisphere feel like April is too early to start the program they want it to start in June or whatever. Unfortunately again it comes back to an issue of time and resources. So basically this becomes a question of I have to issue payment cards for the students and then we have to pay them on a particular schedule based on when their midterms and their finals are and if we have students on a rolling calendar who are constantly starting and having midterms at different times basically I fall over and go insane. I agree. Actually that's all the time we've got questions right at the moment but I imagine some people may be speaking to you afterwards. Thank you very much Carol for that talk. Thank you. I want one second. If you ask the question can you come up and see me afterward? Thank you. Open day as well? Are you ready to start? Yeah we'll have a we'll have a booth at Open Day and and we'll have Schwag and stuff as well and Kat's giving a talk I think on what is open source and it'll be awesome so hooray. Come on down. Okay so before