The Google Summer of Code is Back for 2011!

We are thrilled to announce that for the seventh year in a row, Drupal has been selected for the Google Summer of Code program!

Drupal uses this great opportunity to expand its family with new talented contributors and award its existing long-term contributors. This fantastic program also gets Drupal some amazing new coding projects done! More information about the program is available in the Google Summer of Code website and program timeline.

Some of Drupal's Summer of Code success stories include:

Angela Byron (webchick) the Drupal 7 co-maintainer, a consultant with Lullabot, a Google-O'Reilly Open Source Hall of Famer and a Drupal Association board member.	Gábor Hojtsy, the co-maintainer of Drupal 6, was an existing Drupal contributor who spent the summer helping to get i18n in Drupal core. He is now an engineer for Acquia.
Rok Žlender, whose success on the SimpleTest automator led him to be one of those at the forefront of our efforts to integrate unit testing into core. He works full-time with Drupal at NowPublic.	Andrew Morton (drewish) was mentored by webchick during the 2007 Summer of Code and has become one of the most prolific Drupal contributors.
Joshua Rogers (JoshuaRogers) created the Plugin Manager module which greatly improves the process of installing and updating Drupal modules and themes.	Ezra Barnett Gildesgame (ezra-g) added functionality to the highly used Nodequeue module, which he now fully maintains. He now works at the Drupal firm Growing Venture Solutions.
Bojan Zivanovic (bojanz) became a preeminent contributor to views and contributed to EntityFieldQuery for Drupal 7.	Jeremy Blanchard, created Drupal meetings module in SoC 2010 and now working with OpenSourcery.

So if you're:

• a post-secondary student looking for an exciting project with a thriving development community and tons of smart people you can work with
• an existing Drupal contributor who happens to be attending college/university and would love a chance to get paid over the summer to work on the "Next Big Drupal Thing"
• a seasoned Drupal developer with some time over the summer, who'd truly enjoy mentoring and helping the next generation of contributors make Drupal the best that it can be
• a Drupal community member who might not have the time or coding experience to mentor, but knows where to find resources and enjoys helping others find them.
• someone with a great project idea for an improvement in Drupal that would be perfect for a student to work on over the summer
• a Drupal evangelist who wants to help grow the community by actively engaging students

...then there's something for you in Summer of Code! Read on to find out more.

Prospective Students

If you have enthusiasm the drive to work on something great, now is the time for you to get started! Subscribe to the developer mailing list, look over the developer's guide and API reference, catch up on the lessons at the Drupal Dojo, find a Drupal event near you to get to know Drupal's amazing community, and take on a few bite-sized tasks in the Novice Issue Queue.

Most importantly, start thinking about your project proposal! Prior to submitting your application, stop by #drupal on irc.freenode.net or post your project ideas to the Summer of Code 2011 group to get community feedback. Your chances of getting into Summer of Code increase if the community has the opportunity to review your ideas and offer feedback to help you in improving your project idea.

We have already started accepting applications. For more tips, students should check out the Student Template Page.

Mentors

Please sign up to be a mentor if you have either experience with Drupal development or expertise in a particular area of interest (for example, newspapers, education...) and have some free time from now until the end of August.

To become a mentor,  join the Drupal SoC-2011 group and the sign up on Google's SoC mentor web app (now known as Melange). Please describe who you are, what your level of Drupal experience is, and your motivation for being a mentor. Your application will be reviewed by SoC admins (Chx, SumitK, or Dmitri).

You can go through Advice for mentors page to find more tips on mentoring students.

The more mentors we have, the more students we can get in, and the more exciting projects of varying types we can accept.

Community members

Great project ideas are vital to attracting both great students and great mentors. If you've ever thought "if Drupal could be...", now is the time to turn it into a project idea. The project should be feasible for a Drupal-novice developer student to achieve in a 3-month time frame. Suggest a SoC project idea in the SoC 2011 group or help elaborating already proposed ideas

In addition, you can help review the existing SoC project ideas by providing students and other community members with feedback. Community members are in the best position to help students understand the finer intricacies of existing modules, and help hhem should channel their energies to meet the the priorities of the Drupal project.

To help the new Drupal family members, we need some existing community members to be active in #drupal on irc.freenode.net to answer student questions, point them to the correct resource,s and people with expertise.

If you think this sounds like fun, be sure to get on to IRC!