Yesterday Google announced this years participants in Google Summer of Code <http://socghop.appspot.com/>_, Google’s program that pays students a stipend to work on an open source project during their summer.

This is Sunlight Labs’ first year participating and we were extremely grateful to be granted three slots for this summer. Interest definitely exceeded our expectations leaving us with the difficult job of going through a lot of excellent proposals to select our top three applicants. We wish we could have accepted more proposals and hope that some of the students that found out about us through this program will pursue their ideas even though we were not able to accept them at this time.

Two students, Michael Stephens and Rebecca Shapiro were both accepted for their applications relating to the Fifty State Project <http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/index.php/Fifty_State_Project>_ and will be helping maintain parsers and plan the backend. The bulk of our student applicants applied for this project, and we hope that those that weren’t accepted will consider becoming active contributors as there is a lot of work to go around. These two students stood out in that they both became active participants in the fifty state project prior to applying for Google Summer of Code, we look forward to seeing the amazing progress that will no doubt result from having these two work together on the project.

Choosing our third applicant was a tough choice as there were a lot of unique ideas for transparency-related projects, but our mentors chose Kyle Powers to work on his proposal for a citizen-feedback tool (Get Represented <http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/index.php/Get_Represented>_).

We’ll have regular updates on this site on our student’s progress over the summer, congratulations to Michael, Rebecca, and Kyle and thanks again to all who applied.