Google Summer of Code 2011 is in full swing. Well, it’s almost in full swing: the accepted student proposals were announced today. Many of the students are still wrapping up their winter term exams, so the real fun can’t begin just yet. Today, we enter what Google refers to as the “Community Bonding Period”; this is the time when we mentors get to know our students and prepare them with the information that they’ll need on May 23rd when coding starts in earnest.
The Eclipse Foundation had seventeen (17) student proposals accepted this year. The full list (and I mean full, as in all projects for all participating organizations) is available on the “Melange” site (somebody’s a Frank Herbert fan). Our accepted GSoC Projects are representative of the varied Eclipse Project terrain: we’ll have students working on CDT, e4, Orion, IDE for Education, ECF, EGit, Modeling, and more.
Welcome students.
Eclipse Hints, Tips, and Random Musings 
This is the first year that the Sequoyah project will work with a GSoC student. We’re very excited to be a part of the activity. We’ve read the best practices on the GSoC site, but I’m curious if any of the Eclipse mentors from last year have any advice that’s relevant to just our slice of the world.
This sort of question is better asked on the soc-dev list where all the mentors can see it and offer insight.
The short answer is that you need to treat your student as a new contributor going through the the process of becoming a committer. But with a little more assistance along the way. I’ll spend the next couple of weeks regularly posting about development process, openness, transparency, etc.