Google Summer of Code 2026

General talk
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The OpenStreetMap GSOC admin team – @SimonPoole, @lonvia, @Minh_Nguyen and myself – intend to submit an organisation application to Google as we have done in previous years.

At this point in time we are looking for project ideas and mentors from OpenStreetMap’s open source software ecosystem. If you have suitable projects and/or are willing to mentor a contributor, please add to the 2026 Project ideas wiki page.

If you are unsure about how to proceed with suggesting a project or mentoring, please feel free to ask us at gsoc-orga@openstreetmap.org

If you’re not familiar with it, GSoC is a program that offers students and new open source developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects. To get an idea of the kinds of projects we’ve accepted in the past, you can take a look at the OSM wiki – e.g. the lists of accepted projects in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

For the avoidance of doubt: Contributor applications are not open yet. Have a look at the official timeline for next steps. If OSM is accepted as a mentor organization, applicants will be able to either pick a project from the ideas list or submit a project that isn’t on the list. However, a project can only be accepted if members of the OSM developer community volunteer to mentor it.

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Congratulations to selected! See Google Summer of Code

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As @Mateusz_Konieczny noted the “winning” proposals were announced yesterday. The OpenStreetMap organisation* received 5 student slots for the following projects

  • Category Support in Nominatim

  • DuckDB Backend for Martin TileServer

  • Enhance Pedestrian Routing

  • Automated Routing QA: A Regression Testing Framework for Routing & Guidance Quality in Valhalla

  • Make closures.osm.ch Production Ready

While many of the more than 130 proposals we received were LLM generated without further merit, we still had to par down the proposals substantially to get to the small number that we are actually able to proceed with. If your proposal didn’t get selected, sorry, if you believe your project idea has real merit you might want to try other avenues for funding.

The students with the successful bids will be introducing themselves to and will start interacting with the community over the initial “community bonding” period before coding starts in earnest.

* the undertaking is very OSMish in that is is simply “people organising it” without any support or recognition from the OSMF or any other formal bodies.

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