I’m extremely pleased to announce (after weeks of keeping mum until the official word was released!) that I’ll be co-mentoring several projects for Google Summer of Code and WordPress. For those of you who don’t know, GSoC is an initiative by Google to support summer coding projects by undergraduate and graduate students working on various established open-source projects. WordPress has 15 projects this year, several of which are related to BuddyPress. As a mentor on two of the projects, I’ll be helping to hone the project scopes, do code reviews, and in general lend a hand where I can to my two mentees. Here they are:

• Francesco Laffi has a two-part project. 1) He’ll be working on a rich media component for BP, building on his already popular BP Album. 2) He’ll be constructing a reporting/moderation plugin for BP group forums, which will allow the general user base to play a role in moderating good and bad content within a community. I’ll be co-mentoring Francesco with Andy Peatling, the lead dev for BuddyPress.

  Read more about Francesco’s proposal, in his own words.

• Stas Sușcov will be working on BuddyPress in educational contexts. The germ of his idea is to take ScholarPress Courseware (with its scheduling, bibliography, and assignment tools), combine it with a nice gradebook (maybe something like KB Gradebook), and put it inside a BuddyPress shell. I’ll be co-mentoring Stas’s project with Jeremy Boggs, developer of Scholarpress.

  Read more about Stas’s proposal, in his own words.

I am very excited to get started working with these great students!