openSUSE expands outreach for Google Summer of Code

The community of openSUSE is expanding its outreach efforts to get more involvement from students and mentors to participate in the Google Summer of Code.

Members of the community have been working with University of Applied Science in Nuremberg to encourage interest Free Open Source Software, openSUSE and GSoC.

To do this, members of openSUSE created //opensuse.github.io/mentoring/, which is a mentor/mentee page to provide information about topics potential GSoC selectees could participate in with the openSUSE project.

“We had plenty of good conversations with students,” said Christian Bruckmayer, who set up an information booth along with Hernan Schmidt and Nadja Greiner at the Technische Hochschule Nürnberg - Georg Simon Ohm on Jan. 13 to discuss with students the importance of open source and GSoC.

They handed out descriptions about opportunities available to bachelor/master students who are wanting write their computer science thesis at a company and information about the summer of code.

“Hopefully we will receive a positive response from these efforts in the next few weeks,” he said. “The university has been very helpful and we are doing everything we can to encourage university students to get involved with GSoC, our project and FOSS.”

Students can gain an enormous amount of experience by participating in GSoC and learn some of the latest software and coding like Docker, Ruby on Rails or AngularJS. There are several projects listed on openSUSE’s mentor/mentee page and students can better understand the expectations of the projects listed, the skills needed to participate and how they can get start with the project, which has an extensive project description.

“I think our mentoring page and efforts increasing people’s’ interest and of course we are open source so other projects can fork our template and expand on our idea, which we believe will not only help openSUSE, but FOSS and GSoC.”