GSoC 2014 Mentoring Organization Applications

Over the past five years, The Honeynet Project has been had the pleasure of mentoring over 70 lucky bachelors, masters and PhD students from all over the world through Google Summer of Code (GSoC), Google’s ongoing programme of support for international students working on free open source software (FOSS). Together we have worked on a large number of information security tools, including some that have gone on to be the leading examples of tools in their chosen field. Overall it has been a hugely positive experience for us and our students, and has resulted in many becoming active long term members of our community. We very much hope that will continue in the future.

2014 marks the 10th anniversary of GSoC. This year Google announced the GSoC 2014 programme timeline earlier than usual (in October 2013), and the programme also starts 4-6 weeks earlier than GSoC 2013.

With the early Valentines day deadline for mentoring organization applications being 19:00 UTC on Friday February 14th, we are very pleased to announce that The Honeynet Project has once again applied to take part in GSoC 2014. If you want further information, you can find out more on our public GSoC 2014 webpages.

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 2014 and The Honeynet Project, please remember that GSoC is highly competitive and we first need to be accepted as a mentoring organization. This is by no means guaranteed, with only ~180 of ~450 applying organizations being accepted last year. Hopefully we will be one of the lucky organisations again in 2014.

Over the past few weeks our members have been hard at work trying to ensure that we are accepted to participate as a mentoring organization in GSoC 2014, including recruiting org-admins and mentors, internally reviewing ideas for new project topics and then publishing an initial draft of our public list of project ideas. But please bear in mind that no-organisation or student one is guaranteed a place in GSoC 2014. Like all other potential mentoring organizations we we won’t know until if we have been accepted or not until 19:00 UTC on Monday February 24th.

Hopefully you can start discussing project ideas with us from February 24th, although we’ll be happy to try and provide you with general information before then (and you are always welcome to contribute as a volunteer too). 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 2014 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 many of you on IRC/email in the coming weeks.