Pinoy Programmer Students Wanted: Google Summer of Code 2007

One of the biggest and much-awaited events for the open source community is the Google Summer of Code 2007 (SoC).

What is Soc? Let me give the fastest answers.

Answer 1: It's a scholarship fest. Google sponsors a student from anywhere in the world to contribute code to an open source project. This could be any open source software (OSS) project, so long as it's on Google's shortlist of OSS projects (eg, Apache, Drupal, etc).

To say that it's just a scholarship fest is misleading. And that's why I am also adding...

Answer 2: It's a virtual gathering of open source supporters all over the world. Virtual, because most of the time, the supporters only meet and discuss via email, bulletin boards, instant messaging and Skype.

Answer 3: It's also a strategy by Google to strengthen the open source community. By infusing capital into the OSS ecosystem, Google triggers a sequence of events that brings closer the members of different OSS projects, and also the OSS programmers from all over as one big global community.

Last year, I blogged about the lack of Filipino students in this event, which is unfortunate, because there is a thriving Pinoy open source community and Google shells out dollars to sponsor a student who would like to make a contribution to an open source project. We Filipinos should spread the word about it to encourage more programmers to join, either as mentors or students!

Read the announcement for SoC 2007.