Google Summer of Code 2010 Student Application Deadline Closed

Student applications for Google Summer of Code 2010 closed at 19:00 UTC tonight, with the usual last minute rush of submissions (but thankfully no timezone confusion this time). We had thought that receiving three student applications in the final minute, including one with 8.4 seconds to spare was cutting it close, but Plan9 apparently had one lucky applicant with 1.23 seconds remaining on the clock! That must set a new GSoC record… ;-)

This year the Honeynet Project received 56 student applications, which was almost exactly the same number as last year, with a similar range of org suggested and student suggested own project topics, so thanks very much to everyone who took the time to talk to our mentors and make an application.

Next steps are for GSoC organisational mentors to review each student proposal and score them appropriately. Org admins will assign an initial mentor to each project application by Monday, to ensure the maximum number of potential slots are available when Google run their first cut slot allocation on Tuesday next week. There will be some de-duplication and horse trading of slots between organisations while mentors continue to review student proposals and ask students for any additional information they need until 17:00 UTC April 21st, when final mentor to students assignments must be complete and student applications will be ranked in order by the org admins. Google will announce the official Google Summer of Code 2010 student allocations at 19:00 UTC on April 26th (orgs won’t announce results individually before then, so please don’t ask, even in private).

Although only some of the students who applied this year will be successful in gaining a funded GSoC student slot, please remember that like most Free Open Source Software (FOSS) projects, all of the Honeynet Project’s members and GSoC mentors are volunteers too. Just because you don’t get funding from Google doesn’t mean that you can’t go on to carry out your project this summer, we are always happy to try and support anyone actively interested in getting involved, so please talk to us on IRC or by if we can help.

Finally, we’ve had a lot of student interest in our GSoC IRC channel #gsoc-honeynet on irc.freenode.net and we’ll be keeping this open through GSoC 2010 (and probably to next year too). Thanks to everyone who popped in to say hello and please feel free to drop by and hang out if you have any relevant questions or are interested in getting involved in honeynet R&D too.

Good luck to all of our student applicants!