The mentoring organizations for the GSoC 2019 have been announced. This will be the 15th edition of Google's program to match university students to open source organizations for three month's worth of online programming experience over the summer break.

GSoc is popular both with university students, who can earn a stipend from Google while making a worthwhile contribution to an open source projects, and to open source organizations which gain valuable assistance from students who are eager to do well and have something worthwhile to add to their resumes.

To quote from the Google Summer of Code Student Guide:

GSoC is a place where you don’t just get to apply your skills but also get to acquire a bunch of new ones. And the learning is not just limited to technical knowledge. GSoC introduces you to a new paradigm about building code collaboratively. Not only that, GSoC is a platform which lets you build on your current skills and hone them. There is a project for all skill levels at GSoC!

There's a lot of competition to participate on the part of both open source organizations and students. Google reports that it received more applications this year than last, about twice as many as the number accepted. Among the 207 open source projects that have been chosen as mentor organizations, 28 are new to the program. The list on the GSoC website includes large and small organizations, well-known and unfamiliar ones. To help students identify suitable matches to their interests they are assigned to categories and can be filtered by technology and topics. 

Many more students will be applying than places are available and the advice is start creating your proposal early with the first step being to review the ideas lists of  the mentoring organizations. If you have a different idea for a coding project then you need to find a mentor to back it. As well as lists of ideas, each of the mentoring organizations have application guidelines. First time student applicants will find that its worth reading through a selection to pic up hints about what is expected and what will help your application. Becoming part of the community you want to work with and submitting a pull request, not necessarily related to your application, more to be visible, are frequently encountered pieces of advice. 

A successful proposal is likely to go through several iterations so don't wait to get every fine detail nailed down before making your submission - it may help to ask some question about the mentor's preferred approach to indicate a willingness to communicate.

This year's Student Applications Period is from March 25th to April 9th with the pairing of accepted students and mentors announced at the beginning of May. Students then have a period of Community Bonding in which they get to know more about their organization's community before Coding commences at the end of May and continues until August 19th.

If you want more guidance on how to make a successful application, together with advice given to mentors on how to select proposal, the videos from 2018 on Google Summer Of Code 2018 Student Applications Now Open are worth viewing, After, all it never hurts to know what  is ideally required before you embark on writing a winning proposal.

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