"...The kind birds from your trusty tech collective have hatched a new organization! We call it Riseup Labs. [...] Riseup Labs is actively developing social networking software that is geared specifically to the needs of network organizing and democratic collaboration. We are also planning to make riseup.net nearly impossible to shut down, provide new services, and greatly enhance your security and privacy..."

The annual Google Summer of Code is upon us again. For the uninformed, that’s when Google pays hundreds of students and hundreds of mentors to work on free software projects, ranging from AbiSource to Zumastor. This is where great projects like the GDebiKDE installer were created. And this year looks even better than before, with 175 organizations and 1125 students.

Google has published a list of mentoring organizations and projects for Google Summer of Code 2008. Quite a few gaming and gaming-related projects have made it again this year

Google Summer of Code has again been a huge success for KDE this year. 37 out of 38 projects were finished successfully. Much of the work done during these projects is already merged into trunk and will be available for the users with the KDE 4.4 release in January 2010. Each student quickly presents his work done during the summer holidays.

"This page has the project suggestions for GNU's participation in Google Summer of Code 2008. [...] Many GNU projects have more than one suggestion, so they're listed in alphabetical order by project..."

It's time for another round of Google's Summer of Code (SoC). The SoC is an effort that first started in 2005 as an effort to get students involved in open source code development. Google provides a stipend to the student and to the mentoring organization that helps the student.

Kai Blin this week sent the application for this year's Summer of Code.

The Debian project is proud to announce that it has again been accepted by Google as a mentor organisation for the Summer of Code programme. We have been allocated twelve tasks for this year. Google will fund the students mentioned here to work full time on those tasks during their summer vacation, from May 26th to August 18th.

The free software movement is one the most successful social movements to emerge in the past 25 years, driven by a worldwide community of ethical programmers dedicated to the cause of freedom and sharing. But the ultimate success of the free software movement depends upon teaching our friends, neighbors and work colleagues about the danger of not having software freedom, about the danger of a society losing control over its computing.

When it comes to code, Google's support has made a big difference to the Tor Project. Providing privacy and helping to circumvent censorship online is a challenge that keeps our software developers and volunteers very busy. The Google Summer of Code brings students and mentors in the open source community together to write code for three months every year.