The Results Are In!

Summer of Code has wrapped up for 2007, and we're very pleased to announce that 81% of our student participants successfully completed their projects. This year, the program brought together over 900 students and nearly 1500 mentors in 90 countries to create code for over 130 open source projects, and we're particularly excited that our success rates have remained consistent as the program has expanded.

We'll be bringing you more news on the results of the program, as well as stories from our mentors and students in the coming weeks. We'll also be sharing some of the results of the final program evaluations with you.

Congratulations to all of our mentors and students for another amazing Summer of Code! If you have a story you'd like to share with the community now, please post a comment and let us all know.

Brasilians in Google Summer of Code

It's well known that the Brasilian free software community is vibrant and thriving, and we're excited by the trends of Brasilian participation in Summer of Code. In 2005, 2.2% of participants in the program were Brasilian, growing to 2.5% in 2006. This year, 4.2% of accepted students are Brasilian. Many thanks to our former students, Adriano Monteiro Marques and Felipe Portvales Goldstein for the presentations on Summer of Code and other evangelism they have done at their universities, which no doubt contributed to the increased number of Brasilians who have joined us this year.

Also of interest, while we only had one Brasilian student participate in GSoC 2005 and 2006, we have three students who completed the program in 2006 return again this year.

We have even more exciting news on the mentor side, though; we have over 20 Brasilians this year who have signed up to be mentors, six of whom were students in 2005 or 2006. We're very pleased to see these students offering the knowledge they've gained through Summer of Code back to the community.

We've gotten feedback from the community that it is difficult for our friends in the Southern Hemisphere to participate in Summer of Code, and we acknowledge that balancing the demands of school and additional coding projects can be challenging. We're pleased to see that so many Brasilian students are accepting the challenge and joining us this year!

Women in Google Summer of Code

We've had a lot of requests from the community on some general statistics for the program, and we'll have more posts in the coming weeks on various interesting statistical tidbits about our students of yesteryear and today.

First, the pretty good news. Consistently between 2005 and 2007, approximately 4% of SoCers are women. While we'd like to see that number increase over time, we're still quite happy that it is double the usual percentage of women reported in the overall open source developer population. We're also proud to support some other efforts to encourage women to participate in open source development, such as the GNOME Women's Summer Outreach Program.

The very good news is that our community is passionately invested in getting more women into open source development. Each time I talk to members of our mentoring organizations, I consistently hear enthusiasm around having female students working with them. And where organizations haven't worked with women in the program, they are actively seeking ideas on how to attract more women to their projects.

We'd like to hear more from the community on this topic: how can more women be attracted to open source development? Or, to put it a different way, how can we ensure we're shipping way more women's t-shirts next year?

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