Once again, Mozilla has applied to participate in the annual Google Summer Of Code.

This is the first year that we've organized Mozilla's application to GSoC on Github. Mozilla community members, please put your ideas in the /proposals/ directory, in some suitably-titled file, so that we can evaluate them and polish them up.

As usual this will be an opportunity to coach a smart student through three months of work on an interesting but non-critical-path project that is open to any part of Mozilla, provided:

• the project is primarily a coding project,
• the proposal is well-scoped with clearly defined progress milestones and outcomes, taking roughly 3 months of effort for a capable student, and
• there is a mentor specifically assigned to the project who is available for the duration of GSoC.

You may already have a student in mind for a specific project already; if so, please start that discussion now. The sooner we have well-specified project ideas lined up with potential mentors, the better.

Otherwise please send us your proposals (via pull request) and feel free to bring us any questions you have about GSoC and Mozilla's participation in it. If Mozilla is accepted as a participating organization the student application period will begin March 16th.

With all that in mind, we're now accepting project proposals,via pull request to the /proposals/ directory of this repo.

Your first stop should be to look over the /proposals/ folder. Not all of those ideas will make the cut; it could be that they are not properly defined, the wrong size, or don't have a mentor, and that makes them less likely to get accepted. We may simply be awarded fewer GSoC slots than we have projects.

You can, of course, also submit your own ideas - an idea doesn't need to originate within Mozilla or be 'made official' in order to be viable, but a proposal must have a mentor, a defined outcome of reasonable scope, and a calendar with meaningful milestones to have a shot at acceptance.

While a GSOC project needs a mentor, a good idea doesn't need to come from Mozilla to be a viable GSOC project.

That said, there are a lot of moving parts to the Mozilla project, and figuring out who to talk to can be difficult even if you've got an amazing idea. If this is you, please start by opening an issue describing your idea so we can take a look at it. While we can't promise anything, if your idea looks promising we will do our best to connect you to somebody with domain-relevant experience to discuss turning it into a proposal.

How To Write A Good Project Proposal

• Be specific: It's hard to understand the impact of, or the size of, vague proposals.
• Consider size: Participating students have approximately eight weeks to design, code, test and document the proposal. It needs to fill, but not overfill, that time.
• Do your research: Support the idea with well-researched links to issues, bugs, patches, papers or pull requests.
• Only put a name in the mentor slot if you know they are willing to take on the responsibility. If you think the GSoC admins won't know who you are, leave contact details.
• Stay on top of your notifications: we may have questions about your idea that you will need to answer.

• Participants in any Mozilla project are expected to respect and uphold the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines
• The GSoC FAQ