Google are running their Summer of Code again this year. If you're not familiar with it, see: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/ Interested orgs can apply already up until February 6th (about two weeks away as I write). We've taken part many times before, and it's resulted in both new contributors and interesting new features - I think it's well worth applying again. If you're interested in mentoring, talk to James Aylett or me. You certainly don't need to understand all of Xapian in detail to usefully mentor - any questions you can't answer can be directed to others, and a lot of it is helping students with learning more generic skills - for example what a good commit looks like, automated testing, etc. I'd particularly encourage previous GSoC students to consider mentoring - it's a great way to get more involved, and having seen the process from the other side is very helpful. It's a good way to get more involved with the project. We also need to refresh the list of project ideas. I've done an initial clean up and will do some more over the next few days, but ideally we need a few new ideas to replace those that were done last year. The better the breadth and depth of ideas we have, the more likely we are to be selected: https://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoCProjectIdeas Ideas do *NOT* have to be for work on Xapian itself - projects related to Xapian in other software are within scope (e.g. integrating Xapian into a framework, or adding Xapian search to an open source application). You'll need to provide mentoring related to the other software, but we can help out with Xapian-specific questions. Ideas don't need to be fully planned out - we expect the students to do some research, planning and to discuss the project as part of getting from the project idea to their proposal. But we do need to clearly say what the aims are, give some pointers to useful resources, and a list of required or beneficial skills. And the scope needs to be suitable for taking a student developer about 12 weeks of full time work to complete including suitable documentation and automated tests, and get reviewed and merged. If you have a suitable idea, feel free to add it to the page, or raise it for discussion here or on IRC. This list is one of the key things the GSoC organisers look at when reviewing org applications, so we want it to be in great shape by February 6th. You can still add or improve ideas after then, but it's less likely to make a difference to us being selected. If you are a student eligible for GSoC and interested in working on Xapian, please feel free to get in touch. You don't have to choose from the ideas on the list - you're welcome to propose your own project ideas. If you want to discuss being a mentor or a student, or a project idea, you can do so on the mailing list or on #xapian on freenode (if you aren't already an IRC user, see https://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC_IRC for links to a web IRC client). There's also a general GSoC IRC channel - #gsoc on freenode. Cheers, Olly