I know in the past there's been interest in the Clojure community in participating in Google's Summer of Code program. LispNYC has been a mentoring organization for SoC a number of times, and though we missed the last couple of years, we're gearing up to participate again in 2011. Right now we're looking for project ideas and I want to make sure that the Clojure community is involved.
For those not familiar with this program, each year since 2005 Google has sponsored students from all over the world to work on open source software during their summer break. Rather than work directly with Google however, students work with a mentoring organization, like LispNYC. Students give their project proposals to us, we rank them, and Google grants us funding for the top n projects, where n is a number decided by Google. The program's primary goal is to get students involved with open source, and I can think of few projects more apt for this purpose than Clojure. I'm making a personal appeal to the Clojure community for project ideas because I think it's an ideal place for a young developer to get introduced to the open source and lisp communities. The Clojure community is one of the friendliest and welcoming of these kinds of groups. Furthermore, the state of Clojure as a rapidly maturing but still quite young platform means more opportunity for students to make a substantial contribution they can be proud of. We're interested in project ideas of all types: fun projects and practical projects; projects for Clojure newbies and projects for Clojure mavens. Is there a library you wish existed for Clojure? Support missing for your favorite IDE? A feature that's been missing from your favorite Clojure project? Or maybe if you hack on clojure.core you have ideas for projects that involve changes to the language itself. Whatever your idea is, we want to hear it. You may be wondering why I'm talking about a summer program in February; the answer is that the organization application period is the first week in March. If you'd like to contribute a project idea, please use the form at http://lispnyc.org/soc/idea. If you have any questions, please participate in the discussion on our mailing list ( http://www.lispnyc.org:8080/mailman/listinfo/summeroflisp-discuss/) or in #summeroflisp on freenode. We're also starting to look for mentors, so if you're interested in that, please let me know. Thanks, and here's looking forward to a great summer. /brian -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Clojure" group. To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your first post. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en