Hey guys/gals Summer of Code is ramping up. Every year the common complaint is that not enough Python core projects get proposed by students, and of course a big reason for that is often the only encouragement we offer prospective students is a link to the PEP index. So let's make this year different. Accepted students are paid a total of $4500 to work for roughly 30 hours a week, 12 weeks, on their proposed project. The challenge is finding project ideas for them that could reasonably occupy them for the entire Summer and which the results of their work can be demonstrated. They're being paid for specific projects so "Spend the Summer fixing bugs on the tracker" is a no-go, and Google has outlined that Summer of Code is about code, not documentation. I've seen and heard that a lot of work is still needed on http://svn.python.org/view/python/trunk both during the 3.1 release cycle, optimization possible all over the place. It'd be great if those of you working closely with this can shout out some ideas, brainstorm a bit. PSF was announced as one of the mentoring orgs today, this week before student applications are open is for students to talk to their prospective mentors and iron out the wrinkles in their plans, so there's not much time to get core project ideas together.