What is GSoC?

Google summer of code is an opportunity for students from around the world interested in making a contribution to the open source community while learning newer skills or sharpening older ones. Google invites open source organisations and students to promote open source software development.

This activity..well activity would be a very simple word to describe this mega-event which this is! So this activity has been hosted by Google since 2005. Google in no way empoyees all the participating candidates, it just acts as a governing body for the entire process.

In early January all open souce organications who want to particate in Google Summer of code, submit their ideas for projects to be taken up by the students. Further mentors are assigned for every project through the proposals sent out to the organisations.

In late March, after observing and learning about the projects of our choice, we students start posting our proposals the GSoC portal. Each student is allowed a maximum of 5 project-proposals, of which only 1 is assigned to every student.

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Finally after a 1 Month wait, just when the summers are beginning, fresh like a wind and as crunchy as a toast; Google posts the list of accepted student projects for that years GSoC.

After that there are many stages to be passed before actually becoming a Google Summer Of Code Scholar, involving monthly evaluations and documentation and many other things. The flowchart below will better summaries the process .