This year will be the lab’s seventh straight as a GSOC mentor.

Open Source Lab staff are excited to announce that the lab has been accepted as a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization for the seventh year running. GSoC is a valuable opportunity for collaboration between the lab and young programmers around the world. In the past, the lab has worked with students from China, Portugal, Venezuela and Poland, offering them mentorship and guidance as they complete tasks to advance projects at the OSL.

This year, the lab has several development projects available for GSoC students to apply their skills to. As mentors, lab staff members strive to support student learning and offer an experience that will improve their future work in a number of contexts.

“GSoC exposes young programmers to real-world development and introduces them into the open source community,” says Ken Lett, an OSL developer who mentored the lab’s 2012 GSoC student. “Being able to contribute real and useful code to real projects can be a very inspiring experience, and working on projects with professional standards and development processes will be useful for their own careers.”