For the Drupal community's participation in the 2007 Google Summer of Code program, Google donated $10,000 USD to the Drupal Association earlier this week. This amount represents 10% of the $100,000 USD allocated to Drupal's Summer of Code students. We'd like to sincerely thank Google for this tremendous contribution, which will be used to fund infrastructure improvements and to sponsor Drupal events (among other things). We'd also like to thank Drupal's extensive mentoring team for helping to make this possible.

Google Summer of Code is a program which awards stipends to students who successfully complete an open source coding project. Students from around the world apply to Google-selected "mentoring organizations" (open source projects, Universities, and so on) to work either on projects of their own devising or to implement projects set out by each organization. The top applicants are allocated $5,000 each, of which $4,500 goes to the student upon successful completion of their project, and $500 goes to the mentoring organization. A designated mentor from the mentoring organization helps to advise the student during the course of their project.

This year, Drupal was awarded 20 student slots, which resulted in a number of new contributors and awesome projects, including several internationalization improvements in Drupal 6. Many of our 2006 and 2005 Summer of Code alumni helped out this year as mentors, or even as return students for a second round! We'll be ramping up efforts soon to make Summer of Code 2008 the biggest and best yet! :) If you're interested in helping out, leave a comment at http://groups.drupal.org/node/7157.