It's that time of year again when I will start the usual cajoling and pushing to find the Perl Communities presence for the Google Summer of Code. Yes, once again this is seemingly being done at the very last minute as busy volunteers are once again made busier and I fail to start the ball rolling early enough.[1] But heck this is Perl and Developers, deadlines are those things we like to hear go whoosh as they pass us by, am I right?[2]

However better late than a no-show at the sticky end of a wicket with the last pair riding a duck[3] and we do have the success of 2014 to build on when a great group of mentors and students once again gave us a 100% pass rate and performance. Let's see if we can match their success and increase the students for this year.

So this is it, a call to action. I need people to quickly start to fill in some ideas on this Ideas page on a wiki (which means signing up and I will give you access - so if need be ping me by email, Twitter, Facebook or on irc to get me to respond quickly), or just email them to me and I will put them up and give you access - whichever suits you best.

It would be lovely to see more projects on the list this year. We had people from MetaCPAN (please return) and Rakudo (see the plea to MetaCPAN and please return) but lets have a Catalyst, Mojolicious, DBIc, Dancer, Padre, Task::Kensho, DWIM Perl, Devel::, Perl5 or Perl6[4] project to add to the list and please any other communities or groups or projects let's get you a student and a successful summer of coding.

Please drop by the irc channels (most notably #soc-help on irc.perl.org) or contact myself, Paul Johnson[5], Duke Leto or Karen Pauley to get involved. 'Your Language Needs You', I need you, I am waiting patiently for you to join me.[6] We need ideas, we need mentors and we need people to start shouting out for students at the universities and mailing lists, communities and channels that we all inhabit.

Thanks in advance.

-mdk



[1] I should point out very clearly that this is my failure as I pushed it to the bottom of a long list of jobs. The ever-wonderful Karen P. was very prompt in talking to me about it, I just occasionally suck at priorities.

[2] I still miss Douglas Adams and think of him dearly every time I miss a deadline ;)

[3] I'm not that good at Cricket analogies.

[4] If I missed a project or prioritised projects badly that's just because I threw names at a wall and didn't want this just to be a list of what's available on CPAN. There was no preferential or deliberate omission involved.

[5] Yes I have managed to persuade the ever-busy and wonderfully talented Paul Johnson to join me and Duke as the Organisation Mentors.

[6] Actually I am not that patient as the time is running out so we need some responsiveness.

