[development] 'Tis the Season for Summer of Code

[Angela Byron]

Since some of you don't keep an eye on the front page of drupal.org, 
I'll repeat the salient points of http://drupal.org/node/235590 here:

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) is ramping up fast. For those who don't 
know, GSoC is where Google pays students $4,500 over the summer to work 
on open source projects, one of which is Drupal. :) GSoC has resulted in 
  fantastic code for Drupal, as well as fantastic long-term contributors.

In order to make GSoC a success again this year, *we need your help*!

MENTORS: If you know your way around Drupal coding, and you'll have some 
availability over the summer (May 26 - August 18), then you'd be in a 
great position to be a mentor. Mentors are assigned in pairs to students 
and act as resources to help scope the projects, be there for 
implementation questions, etc. Ever wish you could clone yourself so you 
could work on the cool Drupal stuff you want to do? Help a student do 
cool Drupal stuff! :)
Sign up at:
- http://groups.drupal.org/soc-2008-mentors and
- http://code.google.com/soc/2008/mentor_home.html

IDEALISTS: If you have big ideas about where Drupal could be headed, and 
can spec them out to a level that other people can understand what they 
are ;) then we could use your help in fleshing out our ideas list @ 
http://drupal.org/google-summer-of-code/2008/ideas-list. Projects need 
to keep someone busy for 2.5 months, and need to be something that won't 
already be done by May. ;) We need to get our project ideas list 
finalized *no later than March 24*, so time is of the essence here.

REVIEWERS: Probably *the biggest bottleneck we have right now* is around 
the list of proposals at http://groups.drupal.org/soc-2008. We need an 
army of Drupal folks to take the good community-submitted proposals and 
move them over to our official ideas list, and to provide feedback and 
advice to the student-submitted proposals.

WELCOME WAGON: Don't feel like you have the technical expertise to be a 
mentor or won't have time over the summer to commit? You can *still* 
help by being on the lookout in #drupal for potential GSoC students and 
helping to point them towards handbook pages, API documentation, 
contributed modules, and other resources that can help them spec out 
their projects.

Thanks a lot everyone, and here's to a rockin' summer!

-Angie