Mentoring Organizations for Google Summer of Code 2013 Announced

We are excited to announce the mentoring organizations that have been accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code program. It was tough, but after reviewing 417 applications, we have chosen 177 open source projects, of which 40 are new to Google Summer of Code. You can visit our Google Summer of Code 2013 program website for a complete list of the accepted projects.

Over the next 14 days students interested in applying for the Google Summer of Code 2013 program can learn more about the 177 accepted open source projects before the student application period begins on Monday, April 22, 2013 at 19:00 UTC.

Each organization has compiled an Ideas Page that students will want to review carefully and consider how they might be able to contribute to the project. Some of the most successful proposals have been completely new ideas submitted by students, so if you don’t see a project on the Ideas Page that appeals to you, don’t be afraid to suggest a new idea to the organization.There are points of contact listed for each organization on their Ideas Page so that students can contact the organization directly to discuss a new proposal. All organizations list their preferred method of communication on the organization homepage, available on the Google Summer of Code program website. Please see our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information.

Congratulations to all of our future mentoring organizations! We look forward to working with all of you during this exciting 9th year of Google Summer of Code!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project

Cross-posted from the Chromium Blog

WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium's rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then.

However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation - so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.

This was not an easy decision. We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.

In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat. Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.

Throughout this transition, we’ll collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem. In that spirit, we’ve set strong guidelines for new features that emphasize standards, interoperability, conformance testing and transparency.

To learn more about Blink visit our project page.

By Adam Barth, Software Engineer

Google Summer of Code Meetups, Episode 4: CUNY Hunter College, New York City, USA

On Wednesday, 13 March 2013, Sumana Harihareswara of The Wikimedia Foundation, Daniel Packer (2011 alumnus), and Robert O’Connor (three time alumnus and mentor for the past 2 years) ran an information session at CUNY Hunter College to provide prospective students with information about the Google Summer of Code program.

Students received a fun and informative presentation on Google Summer of Code basics including mentoring organizations, application and program timeline, project structure, and all the awesome benefits of Google Summer of Code. We fielded questions from the 30 students in attendance, all of whom showed strong interest in the program. The interests of those in attendance was broad and ranged from bioinformatics to computer vision and just about anything and everything in between.

A trail of links was followed from the Google Summer of Code site to the mentoring organization site, and then to mentors themselves, with a discussion on how to approach particular mentors and projects. Students also enjoyed sending a greeting to the #gsoc IRC channel and receiving replies and cheers from others in the channel. All in all it was a fantastic meeting which promised to result in some excited Google Summer of Code applicants.

By Robert O’Connor and Daniel Packer 

Stay tuned for another Google Summer of Code meetup post next week. Currently the Google Open Source Programs Office is busy reviewing hundreds of mentoring organization applications and deciding which organizations will be accepted into this year’s program. Participating organizations will be announced on the program site on April 8th.