Google Summer of Code 2006

Google’s Summer of Code 2006 is program that gives “student developers stipends to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund several hundred projects over a three-month period.” It’s the 2nd year for the program, which last year had 400 students and 40 mentoring organizations in 49 countries.

You can find complete details at the Summer of Code website, but here’s the gist: organizations participate by offering to mentor students on particular projects. If Google accepts the organization’s ideas, then the organization and its project ideas are posted on the Summer of Code site. Students apply to Google with proposals to work with specific mentoring organizations. If the students are selected, they work with that organization for a 3-month period.

So, if you are part of an organization that could use some coding help on a cool project this summer or you are a graduate or undergraduate student that would like to get some real-world coding experience, definitely check out the Summer of Code project.

**Update: Mentoring organization applications are due by 8pm Pacific Time today, April 24th**