This year Google again pays students to work for open source projects in its "Summer of Code" project (short soc).

As in the previous year, The Perl Foundation is one of the mentoring organizations; and as such we're looking for Perl hackers who would be willing to mentor such projects.

As a mentor, your task is to

• introduce the student to the community (if necessary), and point him/her to all the needed resources (source repositories, mailing lists, IRC channels, web forum, bug tracker, ...). Usually they know some of these resources already, but not necessarily all of them
• Help "your" student when he hits a road block
• Keep regular contact with the student
• Track her progress, and in the end assess if she should get paid

The topics of the projects are suggested by the students, but usually they appear in areas that benefit the Perl community as a whole, or at least popular sub projects.

In particular we're looking for mentors for these projects:

• Bio::Restriction::* - Improve reading and writing of RE collection in different formats; add support for multicut/multisite enzymes.
• A bioperl parser module for repeats/transposons.
• "CPAN OS Installer", integrate CPAN packages into Unix package managers like rpm and apt/dpkg
• Cross-platform Perl Bindings for wxWebKit

Since the proposals aren't public, I can't make the full text available. If you feel confident in one of these areas, and could afford to spend some time on this (see the timeline for details), please contact Jonathan "Duke" Leto per email (jonathan at leto dot net) or IRC (dukeleto on irc.perl.org or freenode).

It would be especially nice if some of the bioperl folks could join us, since none of the current mentors seems to know much about it.