We just heard today that OGRE has been approved as a mentoring organisation for the Google Summer of Code 2007, which is great news. We participated in 2006 and it resulted in a very busy summer for several people, but it was a very rewarding and productive experience, so we’re glad to be taking part again. For those who have been living under a rock and don’t know what the Summer of Code is:
" Google Summer of CodeTM is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. Google will be working with a several open source, free software and technology-related groups to identify and fund several projects over a three month period."
So there you go – if you’re a student, you can actually get paid to contribute to OGRE over the summer, how’s that for a deal?
Google are now accepting student applications and you should take a look at our Ideas List when deciding on what project to submit an application for. All the information you need to know about the programme is available from Google’s site but you can also discuss the Summer of Code in our dedicated forum which is there from last year.
Important: Bear in mind that participating in the SoC requires a lot of communication and collaboration with the community, it’s not a case of going away and working alone on an OGRE-related project for a few months. You will be expected to develop your code in the open, talk frequently about it, answer questions and generally interact regularly with the wider community – basically precisely what we do here on the OGRE project every day 🙂 And that’s the point – this is about learning what it’s like to participate in an open source community, not about working on a private project for the summer.
We’re very grateful once again to Google for including us in this great programme.