Google Summer of Code applications are open for students starting today (March 26) and closing April 6th which means now is a great time for students and mentoring organizations to find each other!
Picking an open source project is a daunting task at the best of times, and may be extra scary for students in the GF community because we’ve heard the stories about various geek groups. But there are lots of great projects out there with excellent mentors, and many mentors are also part of the GF community. So this thread is to help you get in touch with each other. If you’re a mentor, post about who you’re looking for and why your project is awesome. If you’re a student, feel free to ask questions or ask if anyone knows a project that would perfectly suit you!
Google Summer of Code 2012 logo
I’m mentoring for two projects this year, so I’ll get the ball rolling by describing them here. The rest of you, please feel free to pitch your projects or ask questions in the comments below.
Systers
Systers is a international email community for technical women; many geek feminism readers and writers are already members. The core of Systers is the reasonably high-signal low-noise mailing list, which relies on some customizations of GNU Mailman (see below), and we’re looking for students to help us maintain and extend those customizations, as well as prepare new ones. We have suggested projects requiring a range of experience levels, from beginner-friendly to those for students with some years of experience already, from backend work to front-end usability. Our mentors are drawn from the Systers community, so it’s a great chance for students to work with other technical women! You can get in touch with us via the systers-dev(at)syster.org mailing list and we can be found at #systers-dev on irc.freenode.net.
GNU Mailman
GNU Mailman is free software for managing email discussion lists. It’s incredibly popular among open source projects as a way to build communities and allow developers to communicate, and I like to feel that I’m contributing to more than one project by making Mailman better! We’re looking for students to help with a variety of projects, including work on the archives and new web ui (Postorius), so if you know python or django you’ve already got a head start! And if you’d like to really own your own little feature, from start to finish, there’s some intriguing project ideas there too. Our previous GSoC students really pushed the project forwards and you can see their work in the new web UI. I’ll probably be mentoring Postorius-related projects if you’d like to work with me, and I can personally vouch for my fellow mentors being awesome people. You can get in touch with us via the mailman-developers(at)python.org mailing list or find us on #mailman on irc.freenode.net.
And you are, of course, welcome to ask me any questions you’d like about these projects in the comments below or by email at terri(at)zone12.com.
Geek Feminism Blog 
I’m the administrator for MediaWiki‘s participation in Google Summer of Code. Our GSoC ideas & info page mentions tons of ideas and several potential mentors. MediaWiki is mostly in PHP with some JavaScript/CSS (here’s a guide to MediaWiki’s architecture) and as such is one of those LAMP-y web apps. You see MediaWiki installations in lots of places, the biggest being Wikipedia — your improvements will help millions of people.
We have a “how to get started” page and if you have any trouble you can reach out via our IRC channel (#mediawiki on Freenode) or our mailing list.
Best of luck!
Do you love the Internet? Do you want to learn more about what goes on under the hood when you browse the web, send e-mail, or use an instant messaging service? Check out Twisted, an event-driven networking engine written in Python. We are participating in the GNOME Outreach Program for Women as well as Google Summer of Code under the Python umbrella.
We welcome new contributors of all backgrounds and experience levels. If you have worked on an open source project before, great! If not, we’ll help you learn the development and communication tools we use as part of the program.
This is great! More about related projects encouraging women in GSoC.
I work on the GNOME desktop and organize GNOME Outreach Program for Women. We have a GSoC ideas page and a list of mentors who can be approached for help in getting started any time. The application deadline for the GNOME Outreach Program for Women internships is same as the one for Google Summer of Code, April 6. These internships are open to anyone who identifies herself as a woman. You don’t need to be a student to participate and you can do coding, graphic design, documentation, web development, or marketing work. You can get in touch with me, e-mail the address on the GNOME Outreach Program for Women page, or contact a mentor for the projects that interests you directly to get started.
If you would like to help spread the word, we have a prepared e-mail, a flye, and even a sample social network update that you can use.
There is also a list of a number of FOSS organizations, most of which are participating in GSoC, that are interested in getting more women involved and have lists of mentors who can be contacted any time. This resource also has a prepared e-mail, a flyer, a leaflet, and a sample social network update that you can use to spread the word about it.