Yesterday Google announced the accepted organizations for the 2010 Google Summer of Code and Sunlight is honored to be one of the organizations that will be participating this year.

For those unfamiliar with Google Summer of Code, it is a great opportunity for college students and open source organizations to work together. Google pays students a $5000 stipend in exchange for their work on an eligible project. For more details about the program in general visit the GSoC 2010 website.

This is our second year participating and we’re looking forward to another great summer and a new batch of students and projects. If you’re planning to participate but you aren’t sure if you want to apply with us or not you should know a few things that makes working with us different:

• Each student working with us will have a dedicated mentor from the labs staff and will be working as part of an existing team on an established project.
• Because you’ll be working on a live project, it is extremely likely that we’ll integrate your code as you write it, unlike some projects that have the students work only in a separate branch that may or may not get merged at the end of the summer. This means your work will have immediate impact.
• In addition to writing open source code and getting paid for it, you will also be working on code that aims to make the government more accessible to the citizens and in turn makes the country a better place.

Alright, I want to apply!

If you’re a student and interested in participating, the application period opens March 29th and runs through April 9th. We’re currently in an interim period where it is highly recommended that you spend some time getting to know your potential project and mentor.

The first thing to do is check out our project ideas page to see what projects we’re looking for help on. Please note that because we feel that the seven projects listed on this page represent a wide enough variety of skills and experience levels we are not going to be looking for proposals that are not related to any of the seven listed projects.

If we don’t already know you, spend the next ten days fixing that: spend time in #transparency on freenode, introduce yourself on the Sunlight Labs Google Group, email the listed mentor for the project you are interested in.

Finally, if you have any general questions, feel free to find me on IRC (jamesturk) or contact me directly.

Summer of Code is a great experience for us and for the students that end up getting accepted, if you’re at all interested I’d highly encourage at least getting in touch with a member of labs staff to talk about how you could help the project of your choice.