We are pleased to announce the mentoring organizations that have been accepted for this year’s Google Summer of Code program. After reviewing 406 applications, we have chosen 180 open source projects, of which 41 are new to Google Summer of Code. You can visit our Google Summer of Code 2012 program website for a complete list of the accepted projects.

Students wishing to apply for Google Summer of Code will have the next 10 days to learn more about the accepted projects before student applications open on Monday, March 26, 2012 at 19:00 UTC.

Students will want to pay close attention to the Ideas Pages for the organizations they wish to work with over the summer and consider how they would like to contribute to the project. Some of the most successful proposals have been completely new ideas submitted by students, so if you don’t see a project that appeals to you, don’t be afraid to suggest something. Organizations have listed points of contact on their Ideas Page so that students can contact the organization directly to submit a new proposal. All organizations list their preferred method of communication on the organization homepage, available on the Google Summer of Code program website. Please see our Frequently Asked Questions page for more information.

Congratulations to all of our future mentoring organizations! We look forward to working with all of you during this exciting 8th year of Google Summer of Code!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Networks are everywhere: email systems, financial transaction systems and gene-protein interaction networks are just a few examples. Gephi began as a university student project four years ago and has quickly become an open source software leader in the visualization and analysis of large networks. It is an important contribution to the ecosystem of tools used by researchers and big data analysts to explore and extract value from the deluge of relational data and disseminate a better understanding for people to think about a “connected” world.

Gephi is a “Photoshop” for such data: designed to make data navigation and manipulation easy, it covers the entire process from data importing to aesthetics refinements and communication. Users interact with the visualization and manipulate structures, shapes and colors to reveal the properties of complex and messy data. The goal is to help data analysts make hypotheses and intuitively discover patterns or errors in large data collections.

Our success was made much faster thanks to the Google Summer of Code. The timing of our acceptance into our first Google Summer of Code in 2009 was perfect: we were at the point where we could make the project really open in the way our infrastructure could scale code, and our human organization was ready to welcome contributors. Participating in the program gave us a boost of fame helping us promote the project and created an international community for Gephi.

We met many people and learned a lot, but this is the most important lesson to share: though students are paid stipends for their work during the program, money should not be the first incentive. To encourage students to stick with the project, we talk with each of them to find their deeper motivations in working on Gephi and try and develop a win-win situation. And it works! Many of the students continue to contribute to the project for at least a few months after the end of the Google Summer of Code program, and others have gone on to become members of our team.

We recognize this long-term investment by promoting their work, like André Panisson who released a plug-in in 2010, which connects Gephi to a graph stream and visualizes it in real-time. André made this amazing video of the Egyptian Revolution on Twitter, when he monitored the hashtag #jan25. More recently, Martin Škurla presented his work at FOSDEM 2012 and talked about his plug-in which connects Gephi to the graph database Neo4j. He started his project during the Google Summer of Code 2010 and continued his work until the release. We really appreciated the effort, so the Gephi Consortium and Neo Technologies Inc. paid his expenses to attend the conference. Finally, I must talk about Eduardo Ramos, who we rejected as a student two years ago for Google Summer of Code but who was so motivated that he decided to contribute to Gephi anyway, becoming one of the project leaders, a Google Summer of Code mentor... and a friend!

To learn more about Gephi, watch our madness screencast and view our previous Google Summer of Code projects here. Want to apply for Gephi? Join us on the forum.

By Sébastien Heymann, co-founder of the Gephi project and Google Summer of Code administrator

For the fifth summer in a row, the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent) took part in the Google Summer of Code program and introduced students to open software development in the field of evolutionary biology. NESCent is a nonprofit science center dedicated to cross-disciplinary research in evolution. During the summer eight students from the Google Summer of Code program worked remotely on a software project of their own choosing, each under the guidance of an experienced mentor.

NESCent’s 2011 Google Summer of Code students included Jan Engelhardt, Alexandru Lucian Ginsca, Sarah Hird, Peter Hoffman, Daniel Packer, Andrei-Alin Popescu, Apurv Verma, and Laurel Yohe. Their projects ranged from manipulating next-generation sequencing data for population genetic analysis, to enabling a frequently-used alignment viewer to analyze non-coding RNAs, to generating human readable text that could be integrated into the Encyclopedia of Life from ontologies containing phenotype data. As their profiles demonstrate, the students put their summer to very good use. Meet the students and learn more about their projects on our Phyloinformatics page.

Funded by the National Science Foundation, NESCent is jointly operated by Duke University, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State University.

By Robin Smith, head of communications at NESCent

Andrew Tridgell is a creator of Samba and rsync. Jeremy Allison, Samba co-creator and part of the Google Open Source Programs Office interviewed Andrew at the SambaXP 2011 conference for some quality Geek Time. The two have known each other for many years so there was plenty to talk about. Here are some highlights:

Jeremy asks Andrew how he feels as they approach 20 years of Samba. (0:38)

Andrew discusses what to expect from Samba 4. (1:58)

Andrew chats about the key focus of Samba in recent years. (3:05)

Jeremy asks Andrew to give highlights from his talk at Linux Conf Australia where he talked about the danger software patents pose to free software projects. (6:15)

Andrew talks about how he'd like to see a public forum for the free software community to talk about patent issues. (9:05)

Jeremy asks Andrew to discuss his transition from regular student to free software icon and how he recommends other developers get started in the free software community and become valuable contributors. (10:40)

Jeremy asks why not get started just by reading other people's code? (14:05)

Thanks to Fabian Scherschel of Sixgun Productions for operating the camera.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source Programs

We are thrilled to announce the open sourcing release of WindowTester Pro, a solution that automates the process of GUI testing. WindowTester Pro is shipped as a Eclipse plugin and has support for Eclipse versions 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7. WindowTester Pro was previously offered by Instantiations Inc.

Using WindowTester Pro, developers can easily create tests for every GUI they create. The tests generated by WindowTester Pro are standard Java JUnit tests, thus they can be run within your Eclipse environment or they can be automated to run using Ant. Tests can be generated for SWT and Swing Java applications.

WindowTester Pro contains a recording console that captures and records keyboard clicks and mouse movements. The first step in test development is to turn on the Record feature and then work with various elements of the UI such as windows or buttons. WindowTester Pro will capture the steps taken.

Once the GUI has been exercised, the developer closes the application under test. When the application is closed, the recording is terminated and the test is generated.

Using WindowTester Pro empowers developers with testing capabilities and reduces the time required to hand-code tests. This enables developers to build quality into the product early in the process because problems are found and resolved earlier in the development cycle. WindowTester Pro can help developers and companies drastically lower both testing time and cost.

For more information, please visit the WindowTester Pro home page or join the discussion list.

The Googlers who made this open sourcing release possible include Eric Clayberg, Keerti Parthasarathy, Mark Russell, and Seth Hollyman.

By Keerti Parthasarathy, Software Engineer, Google

With ever-increasing demands being placed on our education system, including new skill sets that need to be taught to create a pipeline that can fill 21st century jobs, we must figure out how to make high-quality education more accessible to more people without overburdening our existing educational institutions. The Internet, and the platforms, tools and programs it enables, will surely be a part of the answer to this challenge.

Open Educational Resources (OER) are one piece of the solution. OER are teaching and learning resources that anyone can share, reuse and remix. As part of Google’s ongoing commitment to increasing access to a cost-effective, high-quality education, we’re supporting the OpenCourseWare Consortium—a collaboration of higher education institutions and associated organizations from around the world creating OER—in organizing Open Education Week 2012, which begins today.

An example of OER in action is OpenStax, a recent non-profit initiative of Rice University and Connexions to offer students free, professional quality textbooks that meet scope and sequence requirements for several courses. They believe that these books could save students over $90 million in the next five years. Non-profit isn’t the only model for open education. Flat World Knowledge has built a business around OER by providing free online access to open textbooks, then selling print-on-demand copies and supplemental materials.

We’ll be acknowledging OER week through a panel event in Washington, DC, and over on our +Google in Education page, where we’ll be posting articles, and sharing stories and interviews about the benefits of open education resources. Opening these resources to everyone can improve the quality of education while getting more out of our investments in educational resources. We hope you’ll join us in celebrating Open Education Week. Go to openeducationweek.org to learn more and get involved.

By Maggie Johnson, Director of Education and University Relations at Google


(This is cross posted from the Google Research blog)

During the Google Code-in contest SymPy had a total of 176 tasks completed by 64 students.

Some highlights of the program:

- The Sympy webpage is now translated into five languages and our tutorial is translated into three languages.

- The interface for SymPy Live was completely rewritten, and many new features, such as tab completion, full screen mode, saved searches, and recent searches were added. We also now have a mobile version of the site available. If you have not used SymPy Live since the start of the Google Code-in program, I encourage you to check it out.

- Our documentation, in particular our Sphinx documentation, was vastly improved. For example, as a result of the program we are now much closer to the goal of including every public functions' docstrings in the Sphinx docs.  We are also now much closer to the goal of complete docstring/doctest coverage for public functions, classes, and methods throughout SymPy. Other documentation was improved as well, such as the isympy manpage and the new cheat sheet.

- Various bug fixes, cleanups, and improvements throughout the code base, as well as changes to our web page and wiki.

For full information about which tasks were completed, see our page on the Google Code-in site.

Thanks to all of these students for your contributions!  We hope that you will continue to contribute to SymPy outside the program, and that you will use SymPy when you find yourself in need of a symbolic mathematics system.

I would also like to thank all the mentors and anyone who helped to review tasks for Google Code-in.
Some of the mentors who helped include: Aaron Meruer, Alexey Gudchenko, Chris Smith, Christian Muise, Hector (Prafullkumar P. Tale), Joachim Durchholz, Mateusz Paprocki, Matthew Rocklin, Ondřej Čertík, Ronan Lamy, Saptarshi Mandal, Stefan Krastanov, and Vladimir Perić.

Thank you to each and every one of you.  Without your mentoring help and assistance with various other things like developing the tasks, SymPy's participation in this contest would not have been possible.

Finally, I want to thank Google for putting on this contest.  This goes out especially to the Google Open Source Programs Office for running the contest and to the developers of Melange, who were helpful throughout the whole process.

By Aaron Meurer and the SymPy development team

Interested in finding bright, enthusiastic new contributors to your open source project? Apply to be a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code program. We are now accepting applications from open source projects interested in acting as mentoring organizations.

Now in its eighth year, Google Summer of Code is a program designed to pair university students from around the world with mentors at open source projects in such varied fields as academic research, language translations, content management systems, games, and operating systems. Since 2005, over 6,000 students from 90 countries have completed the Google Summer of Code program with the support of over 350 mentoring organizations. Students gain exposure to real-world software development while earning a stipend for their work and an opportunity to explore areas related to their academic pursuits, thus “flipping bits, not burgers” during their school break. In return, mentoring organizations have the opportunity to identify and attract new developers to their projects as these students often continue their work with the organizations after Google Summer of Code concludes.

This year we are again encouraging experienced Google Summer of Code mentoring organizations to refer newer, smaller organizations they think could benefit from the program to apply. Last year we had 49 of these small organizations join the program and we hope the referral program will again bring many more new organizations to the Google Summer of Code program.

The deadline for applying to be a mentoring organization for Google Summer of Code is Friday, March 9th at 23:00 UTC (3pm PST). The list of accepted organizations will be posted on the Google Summer of Code site on Friday, March 16th. Students will then have 10 days to reach out to the accepted organizations to discuss their project ideas before we begin accepting student applications on March 26th.

Please visit our Frequently Asked Questions page for more details. For more information you can check out the Mentor Manual and timeline for and join the discussion group. Good luck to all of our mentoring organization applicants!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Despite all the magnificent improvements to both technology and the internet these days, we lack a free and open source real time internet connectivity monitor from which anyone can tell what the connectivity conditions are in any part of the world. Solving this problem is a huge undertaking, but at Umit Project, we saw a chance to start developing such a solution through the Google Summer of Code when we were chosen as a mentoring organization for the 2011 program.
   
We chose a hybrid P2P approach that would consist of hybrid peers and a centralized server that we call the aggregator. The hybrid peers would be able to communicate with each other and pass along reports even if direct connection to the aggregator is blocked, acting as both a server and client and promoting themselves to super peers as needed. The aggregator would be responsible for gathering all the connectivity reports from the peers and showing them in real time in a Google App Engine based site using the Google Maps API.

We also thought of having three different kinds of peers: desktop peer, desktop super peer and mobile peer. The desktop peer runs on top of the same code base but promotion to super peer status is based on the peer's availability. The desktop version is very portable (runs on Mac, Linux and Windows) and is written in Python, while the mobile peer is Android based, can not turn into a super peer and is focused on getting us a view from inside mobile ISPs.

We were given three talented students for the three month long Google Summer of Code, and each of them tackled the different pieces of the system. Despite the overwhelming amount of work and the short time frame they were working with, the students managed to get these systems to form a network, communicate, run connectivity tests and share reports.

The Umit Project team has been working very hard since Google Summer of Code ended in August to deliver our first version of Open Monitor and we're very close to releasing an alpha in the next few weeks for selected trusted testers.

If you're interested in knowing more about the project, its motivation, and more technical details about it, we have released a video on YouTube of a presentation given about the project at the Creativity World Forum 2011 and another talk given at the Chicago Python User Group Meeting. Slides of the CWF11 presentation are also available to view.

Special thanks to Google for their amazing Google Summer of Code program!

By Adriano Marques, Director of Umit Project and Google Summer of Code mentor

We are thrilled to announce the open source release of Cauliflower Vest, a solution that we’ve developed to automate enabling FileVault 2 and escrowing recovery tokens.

FileVault 2 is a major, welcome addition to Mac OS X starting with Lion, as full disk encryption is an important part of securing your computer and its data. While the new FileVault 2 offering is very well suited to consumers, some enterprises may require additional features that are not provided out of the box. For example, FileVault 2 encryption is initiated voluntarily by users, lacks enforcement, and, by default, escrows recovery keys to Apple’s central server. It also relies on individual Apple IDs, which cannot be managed as a group.

Cauliflower Vest bridges these feature gaps by allowing enterprise Mac admins to:

• Forcibly enable FileVault 2 encryption.
• Automatically escrow recovery keys to a secure Google App Engine server.
• Securely access recovery keys so that volumes may be unlocked or reverted.

This release includes a GUI client to easily enable encryption, an escrow service, and a web UI for management. Also provided is a standalone CLI tool to automatically initiate encryption and generate a recovery key without requiring any user actions.

Employees at Google self-enable FileVault 2 using Cauliflower Vest - it’s tested and ready to help you make FileVault 2 part of your enterprise.

We are releasing this source code today as part of our commitment to share Google's unique IT approach with the world, including future releases of Simian and more.

For more information, please visit the Cauliflower Vest project page and join the discussion list.

Several Googlers made Cauliflower Vest possible: Anthony Lieuallen, Avi Drissman, Edward Marczak, Felix Gröbert, Greg Castle, John Randolph, Justin McWilliams, and Mark Mentovai.

By Edward Marczak, John Randolph and Justin McWilliams, Google Corporate Platforms Engineering Team