SoC Report 2012

Contact name: Anne Ghisla

OSGeo Google summer of Code participation in 2012
OSGeo participated to Google Summer of Code in 2012, with 20 of 22 students completing the summer. Several OSGeo projects took part to the program: QGIS, GRASS GIS, gvSIG, PostGIS, Geoserver, Opticks, OSSIM and GDAL. We also provided GSoC-specific umbrella support for two smaller projects from outside of our Foundation: pgRouting and uDig.

Key accomplishments
All in all our students were great and a lot of good work was completed -- perhaps the least remarkable-sounding but most important success we had is how smoothly everything ran in spite of handling our largest number of students yet. Many of our former students continue to be involved in our contributing projects' development and take on roles as mentors.

A couple of smaller external projects we have taken under our GSoC umbrella in the past are now participating in our incubation process to become full members of our Foundation. One of our multi-year GSoC projects (gvSIG mini) now headlines the F-droid (FOSS for Android) repository's homepage!

Areas for improvement

 * more cross-project collaboration: GSoC is a great opportunity to get code written, especially for the improvement of software communication. OSGeo projects vary from backend tools to end-user applications, that would all benefit from an improved communication.
 * full OSGeo projects' involvement: overall, only a half of OSGeo projects answered to the call for mentors, for many good reasons. How can OSGeo GSoC admins facilitate the participation of all projects? Suggestions are welcome. Administrators aim to accept at least one student from every OSGeo project.

Opportunities to help
Do you wish to participate to Google Summer of Code as mentor? Check the yearly administrative page to get all your questions answered.

All: feel free to propose project ideas for the students, on your pet project's Ideas page (full list here), and spread the word in universities and geospatial labs around the world.

Outlook for 2013
OSGeo has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013 - keep an eye on our wiki page!