WordPress Accepted As A Mentoring Organization For Google Summer of Code 2014

WordPress has been approved to participate in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) as a mentoring organization for 2014. GSoC is a global program that offers promising students an opportunity to contribute code to open source projects with a stipend provided by Google.

Last year 1,192 students were part of the program. The 2014 program marks the 10th year of GSoC and Google is expecting to sponsor 10% more students than it did in 2013. WordPress is a veteran organization entering its 7th year of participation and is one of 190 mentoring organizations that were selected this year.

In 2012 WordPress was rejected as a mentoring organization due to a lack of ideas prepared for student projects. However, this year is a different story. The GSoC 2014 codex page is brimming with ideas and there are more than 20 potential mentors already on board. Here’s a quick sampling of some of the ideas put forth for this summer:

• Full-throttle Trac Annihilation
• Forms Plugin
• New BuddyPress Template Pack
• bbPress Per Forum Moderation
• WordCamp Mobile App
• Turn the Beta Testers Plugin into a QA Plugin

What does WordPress hope to gain by participating in the GSoC project? This was one of the questions on the application, which was submitted by Jen Mylo. “It’s a good opportunity to reach students who might not otherwise have considered contributing to WordPress,” she said. “And even if they don’t stick around as frequent contributors, it helps us to evaluate how we ramp up and communicate with new contributors.” Several participants from prior years of GSoC have gone on to become valuable contributors to WordPress, including Dion Hulse, Daryl Koopersmith and Andrew Nacin, to name just a few.

Student applications open on March 10th. If you’re interested to be part of the program, check out the GSoC 2014 codex page for information on how to apply.