Its been a long time since I’ve posted something personal, but I believe this may be worth it. I just got the word back from Google that I my proposal was accepted for their Summer of Code program. If you haven’t heard about SOC before, it goes like this: Google funds students into working on an open source project mentored by a 3rd organization (in my case, that will be the Gnome Foundation).

While each student is free to submit their own new application proposals, some proposals were already set up by both Google and the mentoring organizations. Here’s what Gnome proposed as one of the projects they were in need of:

Implement a live web-based wiki-like editor that allows generation of content that can be rolled back into our documentation. Allows users to contribute annotations and additions to documentation (e.g. can add documentation to an undocumented function), save it. Other people visiting the page will see your additions to the documentation, and the maintainer of the module can extract the addition and trivially roll it into the official documentation source.

What I’ll be doing for Gnome and Google is the proposal above with a twist (which may have been what gave my proposal the edge over the 8700 other people in the competition), and is described on this presentation paper.

Considering my infatuation with online content publishing, my proposal was logical, and apparently good enough to be accepted by both Google and the Gnome foundation. You’ll probably see me blog about the development effort quite a lot, mainly because I’ll be implementing the whole system in order to foster participation using web 2.0 methodologies. Stay tuned. I’m gonna go out and celebrate somewhere.