R projects at Google Summer of Code 2016

This is the 12th year Google offering grants to students living (almost) anywhere in the world for working on various open-source projects at the summer, and R was again selected as a GSoC mentor organization, just like in eg 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014 or 2015.

In short, Google offers $5,000 to the accepted students to work on open-source and useful R packages for a few months with the help of mentors, who get contributed code instead of money from this nice, alternative and open summer ~internship. For the full list of past successful GSoC-R projects, see the above URLs or the archived rwiki.sciviews.org.

As the selected organizations were announced yesterday, mentors should now start posting project ideas in the GSoC-R 2016 GitHub repository as soon as possible. Students should also keep an eye on this list and reach out to potential mentors to discuss the project ideas, as they will be able to submit their applications in the second part of this month, and get notified in late April.

Although GSoC requires a significant amount of time and on-going efforts both from the students and mentors, believe me (I was mentoring for 3 consecutive years) this is an awesome opportunity to contribute to useful open-source projects, raise attention to your awesome R package, be part of a great community, improve your coding skills and resume by referencing a well-known brand.

Again, don’t forget to submit your GSoC 2016 project idea now!