GSoC 2018

Greetings -hackers,

Google Summer of Code 2018 was announced back in September and they've
changed up the timeline a bit [1].  Specifically, they moved up the
dates for things like the mentoring organization application deadline,
so it's time to start working on our Idea's page for 2018 in earnest.

The deadline for Mentoring organizations to apply is: January 23.

The list of accepted organization will be published around February 12.

Unsurprisingly, we'll need to have an Ideas page again, so I've gone
ahead and created one (copying last year's):

https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/GSoC_2018

Google discusses what makes a good "Ideas" list here:

https://google.github.io/gsocguides/mentor/defining-a-project-ideas-list.html

I marked all the entries with '2017' to indicate they were pulled from
last year.  If the project from last year is still relevant, please
update it to be '2018' and make sure to update all of the information
(in particular, make sure to list yourself as a mentor and remove the
other mentors, as appropriate).

New entries are certainly welcome and encouraged, just be sure to note
them as '2018' when you add it.

Projects from last year which were worked on but have significant
follow-on work to be completed are absolutely welcome as well- simply
update the description appropriately and mark it as being for '2018'.

When we get closer to actually submitting our application, I'll clean
out the '2017' entries that didn't get any updates.

As a reminder, each idea on the page should be in the format that the
other entries are in and should include:

- Project title/one-line description
- Brief, 2-5 sentence, description of the project (remember, these are
  12-week projects)
- Description of programming skills needed and estimation of the
  difficulty level
- List of potential mentors
- Expected Outcomes

As with last year, please consider PostgreSQL to be an "Umbrella"
project and that anything which would be considered "PostgreSQL Family"
per the News/Announce policy [2] is likely to be acceptable as a
PostgreSQL GSoC project.

In other words, if you're a contributor or developer on barman,
pgBackRest, the PostgreSQL website (pgweb), the PgEU/PgUS website code
(pgeu-website), pgAdmin4, PostgresXL, pgbouncer, Citus, pldebugger, the
PG RPMs (pgrpms), the JDBC driver, the ODBC driver, or any of the many
other PG Family projects, please feel free to add a project for
consideration!  If we get quite a few, we can organize the page further
based on which project or maybe what skills are needed or similar.

Let's have another great year of GSoC with PostgreSQL!

Thanks!

Stephen

[1]: https://developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/timeline
[2]: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/NewsEventsApproval