I am very happy and excited to be part of Google Summer of Code 2014 and I plan to describe my experiences on this website. The first post deals with my preparations for GSoC.

I applied with an academic project this year, rather than applying for one of the offered projects mentored by an open-source project organization. The past half year I was working on the extraction of experimental information out of scientific publications and I thought it would be great to continue this work over summer and to make the code open source. Google Summer of Code seemed like the perfect platform for that. In the FAQ it is stated, that only about three people are supported for academic projects per year, but Carol Smith, who is in charge of GSoC and the Google Open Source Office (GOSO) encouraged to apply anyways.

Once accepted, I was flooded by Email from other participants. Luckily, that cooled down over time. I am truly impressed by the variety of participants from all over the globe. People work from creating digital life forms to open source computer vision and machine learning libraries.

In addition to the Mailing lists and quickly formed country specific google groups, people reached out directly. Jaan Altosaar, who greatly inspired this website design, is another participant with an academic project. Our projects and interests are related and it is great to exchange ideas and tips with fellow participants. Because we are all working open-source, collaboration is easier than ever before.

If you have a tip, shoot me an email.