I'm very pleased to announce that Django is part of Google Summer of Code once again - and that this year, we're widening the scope of the kinds of projects we'll be accepting.
In past years, we've only accepted projects working on Django itself, and while this has resulted in some very useful pieces of functionality, we've also found that the complexity of the challenges in the core parts of Django can turn away enthusiastic students, or just isn't a fit for some ideas. Thus, this year, we're accepting projects from one of three categories: - Work on Django itself - such as the ORM, forms, etc. This is what we've traditionally accepted GSoC entries in. - Work on tools to support Django or its community - the dashboard ( https://dashboard.djangoproject.com/) is a good example of an existing tool that would have fitted into this category. - Work on libraries that supplement or add new features to Django to aid development - South and Django Debug Toolbar are good examples of existing projects that would have fitted here. We're not looking for people to work on existing third-party libraries - we aren't able to guarantee commit access to them. We may allow an exception if a maintainer of the library in question agrees to help mentor beforehand. The broadening in scope is to allow people to work on new ideas to help Django development and developers without tying you down to having to implement it in the core codebase (and thus ruling out some projects that might otherwise be useful). We're still going to be strict with what we accept - you'll need to provide a strong use case for your idea and show that it would be useful to a majority of developers or significantly improve the development of Django itself. We're not looking for small groups of incremental updates - like "improve Django's Trac" - nor are we looking for impossible tasks, like "replace Trac with this brand new issue tracker I'm writing". What you propose should be a single project, achievable within the time period of GSoC, and something the core developers can help mentor you on. We're also not looking for sites or projects that are merely written in Django - this GSoC is not for you to propose your new forum hosting site or amazing Django-based blogging engine. The GSOC wiki page for this year has some ideas: https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/SummerOfCode2013 - though they are mostly for working on the core of Django itself at the moment. We'll add some more ideas as we think of them, but you do not need to submit from that list. Anything that fits the guidelines is fine. If you have an idea you want to run past us to see if it would be viable before the application process opens on the 22nd April, then post here (django-developers) with [GSoC 2013] at the start of the subject. Myself or another member of core who's helping with GSoC will pitch in and discuss the idea with you. The official application period opens on April 22nd - I'll post nearer the time with detailed application instructions. This is the first year we're trying this widening of scope and we hope it'll invite some exciting new applications. Many of Django's best tools live outside of core and it would be a shame to be unable to help. Andrew -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Django developers" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to django-developers+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to django-developers@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/django-developers?hl=en. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
