The Google Summer of Code 2013 project is about to get started: today the application submission period officially starts (and is open until May 3). Mozilla is again a participating org, and students can find a list of project ideas and application advice in our Summer of Code wiki page. It’s important to remember that the list on the wiki is for possible ideas, but students are not limited to those on the list: project proposals with your own ideas are also welcome. With this disclaimer in mind, I’d like to describe in a bit more details some of the projects that we from the Firefox team have included on the list, and to answer some of the more frequent questions that we have received through e-mail and IRC about them. If you’re a student interested in one of those, read on. I wrote a blog post for each of them:

To make a good proposal, it’s important to keep in mind the goals and non-goals of the project, to demonstrate that you’ve understood how to approach the implementation of the project, and that you’re capable of doing so. It’s also important to create a solid schedule of deliverables that are used both to guide the steps of the project and to validate the pace and the progress up until that point. I’ve already written enough about the specifics and there’s a lot of content out there explaining what makes a good candidate and a good proposal, so i’ll keep this post brief.

Just as a last note, if you’ve sent us e-mail or pinged us on IRC, please be patient because we’re not online all the time or available to immediately reply, and so far we have seen a lot of interest in GSoC, so it takes us a while to reply to everyone’s emails. We hope that these blog posts will help more students to clarify some common questions about our proposals. Good luck to everyone, and remember that you’re always welcome to contribute to Mozilla, during the Summer of Code and every other season too 😀