Summer of Code

Google Summer of Code GSoC
Google Summer Of Code 2015
Status	Active
Begins	April – May
Ends	August
Frequency	Annually
Country	Worldwide
Years active	12 (2005 – present)
Inaugurated	2005
Founder	Sergey Brin and Larry Page
Participants	Students
Website
summerofcode.withgoogle.com

The Google Summer of Code, often abbreviated to GSoC, is an international annual program, first held from May to August 2005, in which Google awards stipends, which depends on the purchasing power parity of the country the student's university belongs to, to all students who successfully complete a requested free and open-source software coding project during the summer. The program is open to university students aged 18 or over.

The idea for the Summer of Code came directly from Google's founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. From 2007 until 2009 Leslie Hawthorn, who has been involved in the project since 2006, was the program manager. From 2010 until 2015, Carol Smith was the program manager. In 2016, Stephanie Taylor took over management of the program.

The program invites students who meet their eligibility criteria to post at most 5 applications that detail the software-coding project they wish to work on. These applications are then evaluated by the corresponding mentoring organization. Every participating organization must provide mentors for each of the project ideas received, if the organization is of the opinion that the project would benefit from them. The mentors then rank the applications and decide among themselves which proposals to accept. Google then decides how many projects each organization gets taking into account the number of applications the organization has received, and asks the organizations to mark at most that many projects accordingly.

In the event of a single student being marked in more than one organization, Google mediates between all the involved organizations and decides who "gets" that student. The other mentoring organization then unmarks the student and marks a new proposal for acceptance, or gives their slot back to the pool, after which it is redistributed.

Google has published the top 15 schools of current year for the period 2005–2016. The list is as follows:

In 2005, more than 8,740 project proposals were submitted for the 200 available student positions. Due to the overwhelming response, Google expanded the program to 419 positions.

The mentoring organizations were responsible for reviewing and selecting proposals, and then providing guidance to those students to help them complete their proposal. Students that successfully completed their proposal to the satisfaction of their mentoring organization were awarded $4500 and a Google Summer of Code T-shirt, while $500 per project was sent to the mentoring organization. Approximately 80% of the projects were successfully completed in 2005, although completion rates varied by organization: Ubuntu, for example, reported a completion rate of only 64%, and KDE reported a 67% completion rate. Many projects were continued past summer, even though the SOC period was over, and some changed direction as they developed.