GSoC 2013 Announced

Like many other open source organizations, The Honeynet Project’s members have been excitedly waiting to hear if Google would be running their Google Summer of Code (GSoC) initiative again this year. Well, the wait the over and GSoC 2013 has officially been announced on Google’s Open Source Blog. This is great news!

The timing of Google’s announcement was perfect, since the Honeynet Project were holding our Annual Workshop in Dubai the same week, which gave us time to hit the ground running and kick off internal preparations. We ran a GSoC recap session with our members who were present (plus live streaming for those who could not make it) and are busy preparing our application to be a mentoring organization again this year, as well as drawing up an internal list of potential student project topics. We also discussed lessons learned from our past four (excellent) years of GSoC experience, particularly how we might standardize and improve our student selection process, and make better use of the community bonding period. It was particularly satisfying to have many of last years successful GSoC students attending the workshop, presenting what they worked on and continuing to become involved in our community and other non-GSoC projects too.

As usual, we will be operating our public GSoC IRC channel #gsoc-honeynet on irc.freenode.net, as well as our public GSoC mailing list for interested students. However, although we understand and very much appreciate your enthusiasm to get involved in what will hopefully be another exciting and productive summer with GSoC 2013 and the Honeynet Project, please remember that GSoC is highly competitive and we first need to apply and be accepted as a mentoring organization. This is by no means guaranteed, with only ~180 of ~450 applying organizations being accepted last year.

This year there has been a fairly major change to the GSoC 2013 timeline, with the deadline for potential mentoring organizations to apply being March 29th. This is later than in previous years, which moves the rest of the GSoC timeline dates back a few weeks too.

Our members will be hard at work during March making sure we do the best we can to ensure we are accepted to participate as a mentoring organization in GSoC 2013, including publishing a public list of project ideas over the next couple of weeks, but please bear in mind that no-one is guaranteed a place in GSoC 2013 and like all other potential mentoring organizations we we won’t know until if we have been accepted or not until April 8th.

Fingers crossed you can start discussing project ideas with us from April 9th, although we’ll be happy to try and provide you with general information before then. In the mean time, if you would like to promote GSoC in your academic institution, you can find Presentations, Logos and Flyers on Google’s main GSoC 2013 site.

A big thank you from all our members to Google for choosing to run GSoC again this year. We are very much looking forwards to having the chance to hopefully participate, meet some more great students and develop another round of new projects this coming summer. Hopefully see you on IRC/email in the coming weeks.