We’re proud to announce we’ve been accepted as a mentoring application for the Google Summer of Code 2011.

If you aren’t familiar with Google Summer of Code, it is a great opportunity for college students and open source organizations to work together. Google pays students a $5000 stipend in exchange for their work on an eligible project. For more details about the program in general visit the GSoC 2011 website.

This is our third year participating and we’re looking forward to another great summer and a new batch of students and projects.

If you’re planning to participate, here are a few reasons to consider applying to work with us:

Each student working with us will have a dedicated mentor and will be working as part of an existing team on an established project.

Because you’ll be working on a live project, it is extremely likely that we’ll integrate your code as you write it, unlike some projects that have the students work only in a separate branch that may or may not get merged at the end of the summer. This means your work will have immediate impact.

In addition to writing open source code and getting paid for it, you will also be working on code that aims to make the government more accessible to the citizens and in turn makes the country a better place.

Alright, I want to apply!

If you’re a student and interested in participating, the application period opens March 28th and runs through April 8th. We’re currently in an interim period where it is highly recommended that you spend some time getting to know your potential project and mentor.

The first thing to do is check out our project ideas page to see what projects we’re looking for help on. This year we’re looking for help on the Open State Project, Real Time Congress API and iOS app, our Congress for Android app, and in partnership with our friends at EchoDitto looking for some help creating Drupal modules to make use of Sunlight API data.

If we don’t already know you, please spend the next ten days making sure that we do. Spend time in #sunlightlabs on freenode, introduce yourself on the Sunlight Labs Google Group, or email the listed mentor for the project you are interested in.

For the past two years we’ve found Summer of Code to be a great experience for us and for the students that we’ve worked with. If you’re at all interested get in touch with us and we’ll help you find the project best suited to your skills.