Earlier today, Google officially accepted Joomla! as one of the 108 projects to qualify for the Summer of Code 2009. This will be our fifth year in GSoC and is a fantastic vote of confidence in our project and community. Thanks, Google!

Now we are on a tight timeline to create our team of project mentors so we can (1) evaluate and select the student proposals and (2) provide mentors for all of the selected students. Student proposals will start arriving March 23 -- only five days (count 'em) from now. So we need mentors -- fast.

What do you need to be a mentor? The answer is in the Joomla! GSoC Student and Montor Guidelines. If you fit the mentor description, you can request to join as a mentor by (1) logging into Google (for example, with a Gmail userid) and (2) clicking the Submit button on this link.

Once you are selected as a mentor, the first job will be to help students create great proposals. Here are some important links for this:

• Joomla! GSoC Google Group - newsgroup for discussing project proposals and other issues
• Joomla! GSoC Skype Chat - Skype chat for more immediate discussions
• 2009 Project Ideas Wiki - list of 30+ possible project ideas (feel free to add and edit!)
• Google Summer of Code 2009 Site -- Google's official site with lots of information about the program

We would like to sponsor up to 20 students. To do that, we would ideally like about 30 mentors. We already have some intrepid volunteers but we need a lot more. So, people of Joomla!, we are counting on you.

If you have any questions, please feel free to ask your faithful GSoC administrators: me or Krit. Thanks!