If you're interested to see who will work on the Summer of Code for GNOME, run to the Planet GNOME Summer of Code 2006! I guess this will be the best place to monitor all the cool work that will happen in the next three months. There's also #soc on irc.gnome.org, so feel free to join. Some discussion will also happen on gnome-soc-list, where all the students and the mentors should be subscribed, but this will most probably be some administrative discussions.

It looks like I'll mentor Ryan and Etienne for GNOME. Ryan will work on the applets and I believe the result will be amazing. It might look like a project that will only have an impact on developers, but in the end, it will change the way we work with the applets and, hopefully, the notification area. Etienne will provide a library to use scanners, based on SANE, but with real UI love. The library should of course be dead-easy to use it in your application.

I'll also help Sébastien mentor Peter Moberg for an Ubuntu project. Peter will work on two small applications (and maybe more, if he has time), the main idea behind them being that it should be easy to save, restore, and maybe even share your GNOME configuration. Like, for example, sharing your panel layout, or restoring the initial configuration of GNOME. I know I'll use this when smoketesting GNOME!

Some of the students will go to GUADEC. This is good news since they should all feel part of our community. I hope they'll be able to show us some of their work they've done.

I nearly forgot the teaser: expect some other good news related to the Summer of Code in the next few days ;-)

Davyd: you can't imagine how hard it is to buy a good lycra jumpsuit. I mean, did you ever try to ask for a green lycra jumpsuit in a store? Go and try it! And you'll understand that it's not an easy life.

In other news, we finished ranking the GNOME applications for the Summer of Code. It was really hard and I expect lots of people will be sad that some project didn't make it. On the other hand, I'm pretty excited by our current list of projects: while they're not all in my personal wishlist, I'm convinved the outcome will be rocking!

Note to GNOME mentors: read your mails sent to the address with which you registered. You should have received voting informations.

Summer of Code has kept some of us quite busy since the beginning of the month. Some quick figures from GNOME:

• 182 eligible applications were received
• 56 mentors registered
• we requested 40 projects
• we will most probably be allocated ~20 projects

A good percentage of the 182 applications are really great, and it makes it hard to rank all the applications to choose only 20-30 of them. We had an IRC meeting two days ago to take some decisions, and mentors now have to vote for their preferred applications.

I'm also registered as an Ubuntu mentor and I was quite surprised to find a bit less interesting applications there (even if there are still a lot of interesting applications ;-)).

One of the big strengths of the Summer of Code is that it makes everyone really enthusiast. I'm not sure what is the magic ingredient that creates all this interest (Google? money? free software?), but if it's possible to keep everyone excited like this all year long, we can make wonders.

Many thanks to Google for organizing this and being responsive to all the requests people are sending.

I'm really excited by this year's Summer of Code: we have tons of great ideas and after only a few hours, we already received some applications for projects.

Every student should apply and submit a GNOME project (deadline is May 8th). And don't worry if you're not deeply familiar with the GNOME community, since this is an ideal way to get involved in GNOME: you'll have a project with specific goals, a mentor will be here to guide you, you'll get to know how the community works, and, hopefully, the results of the project will be used in the GNOME universe.

I'm eagerly waiting to see everyone rocking!