With Socis, ESA offers selected student developers stipends to write code for a group of twenty pre-selected open source projects. The organisation pairs the student to one or more mentors at the software project.

It is the second edition of Socis. "The program is inspired by (but not affiliated or related in any way to) Google's Summer of Code initiative."

This year students can again choose between twenty software development projects. Examples include Marble, an electronic atlas, Gerbil, software to visualise multispectral and hyperspectral image data and Delta, software involved in analysing satellite image data.

Students who take part in Socis "gain exposure to real-world software development scenarios", ESA explains on the Socis website. "In turn, the participating projects are able to more easily identify and bring in new developers."

Next to improving the space-related software, ESA hopes that Socis raises awareness of projects related to space within the open source programming community, especially among students. A second aim is to make the open source community more aware of the agency.

More information:
ESA Summer of Code in Space (Socis)
Selected open source projects
Linux Magazin news item (in German)
Joinup news item on ESA's Socis 2011