Google Summer of Code 2012 Timeline Announced

Google's Summer of Code project has been highly successful, by any metric. Students have contributed to countless open source projects through it, gaining experience and a nice thing to put on their CV, while at the same time improving products used by millions of people.

The eighth edition of the project has been announced, quite unsurprisingly, so students interested in it can start preparing.

"This will be the 8th year for Google Summer of Code, an innovative program dedicated to introducing students from colleges and universities around the world to open source software development," Google's Carol Smith from the Open Source Team wrote.

"The program offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects with the help of mentoring organizations from all around the globe. Over the past seven years Google Summer of Code has had 6,000 students from over 90 countries complete the program," the said.

"Our goal is to help these students pursue academic challenges over the summer break while they create and release open source code for the benefit of all," she added.

There's still time to consider your application, but anyone interested had better start planning.

Organizations wanting to mentor students through the program can start applying later this month, on February 27. If past years are a guide, there will be plenty of organizations that will want to get involved. This application period ends on March 9.

A week later, on March 16, the list of accepted projects and organizations will be announced by Google.

For students, the application period starts on March 26 and ends on April 6. They'll have to wait until April 23 for the results, accepted students and their proposals will be revealed then on the Google Summer of code 2012 site. The actual program starts on May 21.