Google has announced the participants for this year’s Google Summer of Code, and we’re proud to have four excellent students out of a great overall batch of applications.

We’ll be posting updates here over the course of the summer on how the projects progress. Even though our students don’t wrap up their classes for another few weeks and so the real work won’t begin until May we figured we’d go ahead and introduce our four new students and their projects to the community.

Although we were only able to accept four students we’d encourage students that are interested in finding other ways of getting involved: all of our code is on github, and we frequent our google group and #transparency on freenode. Active community members have a huge advantage when it comes to being considered for future programs.

Congress Android Application

Eric is our resident Android expert and creator of our Android Congress App. He has selected Evelina Vrabie, one of the many students looking to work on the project. Evelina will be helping out with various features and improvements for the Congress app for Android. She’ll be adding notification features for users who want real time updates about action in Congress, and experimenting with new ways to show the life and times of bills as they become law. Evelina will also help refactor the app’s code to make it easier to handle state legislatures.

Fifty State Project

The Fifty State Project is a Sunlight Labs initiative to collect the legislative data from all fifty states and provide it in a common format for developers to build upon. This year we’ve selected Gabriel Perez, he will be joining the project with a focus on expanding our coverage in approximately ten new states. During the application period Gabriel started on a Washington State scraper, and might also be contributing an extra scraper for his native Puerto Rico.

National Data Catalog

For the recently launched National Data Catalog, David and Luigi have chosen Mike Dvorscak. Mike will be tasked with the expanding the breadth and depth of the catalog. First, Mike will be writing more importer scripts to get more data listed in the catalog. States like Massachusetts, Michigan, and Rhode Island, and cities like San Francisco, New York, and Seattle publish their open data in their own catalogs. We need to regularly import from these existing catalogs. Then, Mike will focus on enhancing the curation tools behind the scenes at the National Data Catalog. He’ll be building tools to group data into sets (like the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventories), perform deduplication, automate link checking, and monitor the overall quality of the catalog data.

Clearmaps

Our fourth student was selected to work on ClearMaps, a project developed internally by Kevin as a result of a need we had on Subsidyscope. Vijay Krishina Mulpuri will be working with Kevin on improvements to the ClearMaps Builder application, developing line simplification tools that will help reduce the size and complexity of map features. Line simplification is important for making maps small enough for quick delivery over the web. We hope that Vijay’s work will not only be of use to users of ClearMaps but of value to the larger open source GIS community.