Development Seed Blog

We found out today we'll be mentors for two of Google's Summer of Code projects, and we are excited. In sum, 20 Drupal projects were accepted in the Summer of Code, which is great news for the community.

Myself along with Ted Serbinski from Lullabot will mentor William White. Will's project will incorporate SMS elements into Drupal websites, and I'm particularly excited to work with the driver based API he develops to integrate with SMS service providers. It will be great to see what kind of use cases there are out there first so that whatever system Will comes up with incorporates common SMS elements into Drupal websites.

Alex Barth will be one of Aron Novak's mentors. In his project, Aron will look at several different modules that currently deal with aggregation in Drupal, consider the best and missing features, and compile them into a new, consolidated aggregation module, if not an API from which to build. This will be really helpful for us since we’re incorporating aggregation into many of the website and intranets we’re working on, and the current solutions all have shortcomings.

I’m also really looking forward to seeing Gabor's work building translation tools for teams and users, and Maxim Khitrov's project integrating Jabber/XMPP into Drupal.

But 20 projects and 20 students is just the surface of the impact. If you look at http://drupal.org/node/135602 you see there are two or more mentors for every student and project. Although Google will grant $4,500 to every student and $500 to the Drupal Association for all 20 sponsored projects, the investment about to take place in Drupal will be much more than this $100,000. The coordination between mentors and students, the time already taken to vet good proposals, the testing that will be done by the Drupal community at large, and any feedback from the community the students seek as they finalize their plans adds up to something much greater than $100,000 - it adds up to sustainable open source software solutions that keep getting better.

Like Robert Douglass said to me at DrupalCon/OSCMS in Sunnyvale, CA (thank you Yahoo! - another big investor), if you look at the lasting impact from the SOC program, it's not just code. It's also people who stick around that really make an impact and keep giving back - like Angie Byron (webchick) who participated in SOC as a student herself and now does a lot of the organizing and continues to give back to Drupal through her own time and great work with Lullabot. A big thank you to both Angie and Robert, and everyone else organizing, vetting proposals, mentoring, reviewing, about to give feedback, and to the students who "chose Drupal"!