According to Leslie Hawthorn, open source program coordinator at Google, the biggest change for 2007 is the increased preparation time. While in previous years the program has started taking applications in April and started in late May, this year the program was announced in February, with mentor organizations applying to participate from March 5-12 and students from March 14-23. Successful applicants will be announced on April 9, and the program will officially begin on May 28.
Summer of Code is an amazing program sponsored by Google. Thousands of dollars are invested every year into this program which helps produce a lot of new code for open source projects like Drupal and Gallery.
I myself cannot participate because I am not a programmer, but I love seeing the results and seeing what is actually going on with the program.
I can concur with their lessons learned though from the previous years. I have always felt they rushed the program a bit and never actually spent the proper time to consider their applicants and accept them into the program in a timely manner to get the work done they needed to finish.
The program is amazing, but small changes such as these will help the program grow by leaps and bounds to get the most out of the program. Google does some amazing things for the open source community and this is just one of them.
