Google Summer of Code 2011 and AbiWord

Being a mentor for Google Summer of Code is yet another interesting experience like being a student. It was a nice memory going through all the 23 excellent proposals for AbiWord and reviewing them as a mentor, during the night at our annual trip at Kandalama. This year, AbiWord has got more smarter applications. GSoC deduplication meeting was something remarkable, where the organization admins (or a representative/mentor from the organizations) resolve the duplicate students issue in the presence of the Google Summer of Code admins over #gsoc at irc.freenode.org. Many students were also seen in the irc meeting to check whether they have been accepted for multiple organizations, and in that case, where are they going to work for their summer. Selected students were announced by Google on 1900UTC, 25th of April, a few days after the dedup meeting.

The list of accepted students, along with their project proposals as well as their mentors are given below.

Fabiano Fidencio - "Get our Mac Port up to speed" - Mentored by Marc Maurer
Volodymyr Rudyj - "Implement an ePub filter" - Mentored by Xun Sun
Chen Xiajian - "Implement Hyphenation" - Mentored by Kathiravelu Pradeeban
Aseem Sharma - "Port AbiWord to Gtk-3.0" - Mentored by Jean Bréfort
Andrei Sfrenț - "Reduce flickering" - Mentored by Martin Sevior

An important factor to notice is that, since 2006, AbiWord has successfully been participated in all the Google Summer of Codes (2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011). Hence this becomes the 6th consecutive year for AbiWord to participate in Google Summer of Code! I wish the 5 students who got selected a great summer of code with AbiWord, and I hope they will continue to be a long term contributors even after their summer. At the same time, I should also note that, we had to miss a few nice students as we have only 5 slots. Hope they will still continue with their development on AbiWord.