
Google Summer of Code 2021
17 February 2021The Google Summer of Code is a long-running program sponsored by Google where students get a stipend for pursuing coding projects in open source.
As Google describes it:
“Google Summer of Code began in 2005 as a complex experiment with a simple goal: helping students find work related to their academic pursuits during their school holidays. The perfect answer came from encouraging students to participate in open source projects”
INCF has participated in the program since 2011 as a mentoring organization, identifying and recruiting mentors from our community who volunteer to mentor one or more students in open source software development over the summer. INCF has served as an umbrella organization, requesting and reviewing project ideas from community projects and pairing students with mentors. Students are in turn supported by a stipend from Google.. Many core INCF community tools have been improved, extended, and made more interoperable as a result of GSoC.
Community participation has grown each year, from a handful in 2011 to more than fifty prospective mentors in 2021. Many projects and mentors have participated in multiple seasons of GSoC; to recognize the impact of their GSoC efforts, we now refer to their GSoC activities as INCF GSoC-supported Working Groups which affords them with the same status as our regular INCF Working Groups (links to deliverables, list of contributors, etc…). From 2016 to 2020, INCF has paired 87 students with 107 mentors. We also welcomed one of our former 2018 GSoC students, Arnab Banerjee (project: Physics-based XML Model building for mosaic embryogenesis of Caenorhabditis elegans mentored by Bradly Alicea for OpenWorm), to join us as co-organization administrator.
The core of an organization’s application to Google, to be approved by them as a mentoring organization, is the Ideas List - the list of project ideas/idea scope that the organization is confident it can support with the help of its existing mentor base. INCF generates its Ideas list by sending out a call to the wider neuroscience tool developer community for project ideas, reviews submitted projects and mentor qualifications, and submits the resulting list with the application to Google.
We encourage all interested students to visit our GSoC forum Neurostars, where students can discuss project ideas with mentors and get help forming their own project plan.
READ MORE:
INCF Ideas List for 2021
Google Summer of Code FAQ
Google Summer of Code 2021 timeline
Google Summer of Code guides for mentors and students
INCF GSoC Working Groups