This year, we are changing the way we participate in GSOC by attempting to run projects which are driven more by the needs of the solar physics research community. SunPy GSOC projects must be a code contribution to an existing SunPy affiliated package (https://sunpy.org/affiliated/), cannot be purely research projects, and must meet the coding guidelines of the package to which they will be contributing. The objective of the GSOC program is to give people experience of contributing to Open Source projects.
To this end, we are inviting the broader solar physics community to propose project ideas for potential GSOC contributors. We are specifically looking for ideas that involve meaningful code contributions to existing SunPy-affiliated packages and that naturally draw on a reasonable level of solar-physics background (from undergraduate level upward). The deadline for these ideas is the 3rd February as they form part of the application to Google. If you have an idea please comment on SunPy’s Discourse forum: https://community.openastronomy.org/t/solar-physics-gsoc-idea-suggestions
We also encourage the community to publicize this program to interested students within their institutions. To be eligible to be a GSOC contributor they must be over the age of 18 and a “beginner contributor to open source”. The full eligibility criteria can be found here: https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/rules. We will send a further reminder about this before applications for contributors arrive.