OSGeo has been accepted as a mentor organization for GSoC 2017, see http://www.osgeo.org/node/1772

It helps student developers to contribute to open source software - https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/

See the OSGeo page for more details:

The timeline for 2017 is:

• February 27 - March 20 Potential student participants discuss application ideas with mentoring organizations
• March 20 Student application period opens
• April 3 Student application deadline
• May 30 Coding officially begins!

In previous years the MapServer project has mentored students for the following features:

• 2013 - GSoC UTFGrid
• 2009 - KML Output
• 2009 - SVG Symbol Support

Several items of interest can still be found on the OSGeo wiki pages:

• 2009 GSOC page - binary Mapfile format and tilted perspective maps
• 2010 GSOC page
• 2011 GSOC page
• 2012 GSOC page
• 2015 GSOC page

Please add any ideas below. Even if it is not possible this year it could be useful to keep track of possible future features. Note each idea needs 2 mentors, even if not proposing mentorship please list possible new features for discussion.

• Apply patches to the TinyOWS project
• An online MapFile validator in a similar style to http://jsonlint.com using the https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mappyfile/ library on the back-end
• An interactive "gallery" showcasing all the features on MapServer as part of the online docs