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Today, the Google Summer of Code 2008 accepted students were announced. 7,000+ applications to 175 mentoring organizations from nearly 4,000 students, of which 1,125 will be funded. Altogether, this means a $5.6+ million dollar investment in open source from our buddies at Google. Kick ass!

How did Drupal make out? We will be mentoring 21 Summer of Code projects from our 84 submissions. Drupal's mentor team did an outstanding job of weighing the pros and cons of each proposal, making difficult decisions, and ultimately choosing an exciting mix of projects and students:

In case word hasn't reached you yet for some reason, Summer of Code 2008 is a go, and this is the week for college/university students to submit applications to work on projects for their mentoring organization of choice over the summer. Our hope is of course that a whole bunch will choose Drupal, which is an awesome, knowledgeable, and fun community to be a part of, and very supportive of SoC students (I know, because I was one myself back in 2005! :D).

As part of my duties for the Drupal Association, I help to administer initiatives that help bring in new contributors, like Drupal's involvement in Google Summer of Code. A huge thanks to the admin team -- chx, cwgordon7, and dmitrig01 -- for their tremendous efforts in getting the program kick-started!

We're trying something new this year that we haven't done in years past: public community review of student ideas and proposals, prior to their submission as formal applications for Summer of Code. There are multiple reasons why we chose to "beta test" this approach, which I will detail after the break.

However, for those who want to help bring new contributors to the Drupal project, and have a hand in deciding what new awesome projects get funded over the summer with Google's multi-thousand dollar investment, please jump in and help review some student proposals! The absolute deadline for student applications is Monday, March 31, 2008 at 17:00 PDT, so it's imperative that students get their questions answered and their proposals reviewed and refined as soon as possible so they have ample time to get their applications in.

On Tuesday (Drupal's 7th anniversary), we held the very first meeting of the "General Assembly" (all of the Drupal Association permanent members) in order to elect a new Board of Directors and additional permanent members.

Trying to decide on where to set the bar for people who want to join the ranks of the Drupal Association was quite a harrowing experience. Permanent members are, well, permanent... unless they either resign or 2/3 of the existing members vote them out, which is likely to only happen in the event of some major drama. They can change the statutes (the legal binding documents) guiding the Drupal Association. They can remove Board of Directors members (and other permanent members). It's a lot of trust to place in individuals, and so we needed to make sure we chose very carefully...

Just a reminder for all those in Drupal-land that on January 15th we'll be holding the very first General Assembly, where the Drupal Association permanent members will vote in a new round of permanent members and a new board of directors will be selected. This is the first time we're going to be admitting new members beyond the initial folks who helped review the statutes, so it's a pretty exciting and important event.

The deadline to submit candidacies has passed, but you still have until then to read and comment on all the various applicants. And if you submitted your candidacy but haven't looked at the site in awhile, please check it again, as a bunch of folks have been discussing these applications already.

Remember that the more feedback we get from the broader Drupal community on these candidates, the better job we're likely to do in voting. So please, add your personal experiences with folks (particularly if they're not a "household name" in the Drupal community yet). Ask questions to help clarify the candidates' goals and experience. Challenge things in their applications that don't seem to quite add up.

If we can do candidate reviews as well as we do patch reviews, we should be in for an awesome second year for the Drupal Association. :)

I've created a post to solicit community feedback for the 2008 Drupal Association Marketing/Communications budget at groups.drupal.org. If you're interested in providing ideas on what types of things you'd like to see the Drupal Association focus on in terms of marketing/communication efforts, and/or you happen to be knowledgeable of costs, benefits, etc. of such things (for example, you have actual experience in marketing, as opposed to being a PHP developer who somehow always gets roped into this kind of stuff ;)), please feel free to edit the page and give your opinions. Sometime after November 19 (two weeks' time), I'll take the feedback there and work up a formal budget proposal for the forthcoming General Assembly.