GSoC needs you (and you need it back)

[Johnny Jazeix]

We're back! We just nailed down SoK 2026 and mentors and mentees are
already all working on projects which aim to improve our websites,
apps, research, documentation, and more.

**Now we need to focus on Google Summer of Code.** We're calling on
all developers, maintainers and contributors to submit ideas for GSoC
mentees and volunteer to mentor the next generation of KDE
contributors.

Please visit

https://community.kde.org/GSoC/2026/Ideas

and add your ideas so that mentees can articulate their proposals or
become inspired to suggest their own.

IMPORTANT: **DEADLINE IS SATURDAY 31ST OF JANUARY!**

## Some ideas

Here are some ideas we came up with that may help get your creative
juices flowing:

### From past years

- **Improving Kdenlive timeline markers:** The project extended the
marker data model to support a duration attribute while maintaining
backward compatibility. The UI was updated to visualize range markers
as colored regions on the timeline, with interactive handles for
resizing and editing.
- **Developing Dataset Editors for GCompris Activities:** This
projects aimed to add more dataset editors to GCompris activities,
enabling teachers to easily create and customize datasets through
intuitive GUI editors.
- **Forms/Javascript support improvement for Okular:** This project
aimed to improve the support for PDF forms in Okular as much as
possible and make the feature set more consistent with Adobe Acrobat.

### From our feverish imagination

- **Animated graphs for LabPlot:** Static graphs are all very well for
explaining what is happening at a given moment, but sometimes, as Hans
Rosling showed us, to understand our world better, it is a good idea
to show how data evolves over time with an animation. In this project
we will be creating a framework to add animations to graphs created in
LabPlot, Cantor and other data visualisation tools.
- **Supporting Fountain in GhostWriter:** GhostWriter is one of KDE's
hidden gems: an MD editor that takes the non-distracting interface to
the extreme. GW would be ideal for screenplay writers, and could
deliberately all the distracting bells and whistles of other tools
screenwriting. In this project we will implement previewing Fountain
markup in film script format, and exporting texts to film
script-formatted PDFs.
- **Give Dolphin support for Miller Columns:** Look'em up. The best
way to navigate and manage a complex file system tree.

## Why mentor

There is so much to gain!

**Your project** can advance in ways that may have been stalled, or
acquire features you had not thought of. Mentoring a wannabe
contributor is a great way of giving a dynamic push to your app.

**The mentees** gain invaluable insight into how FLOSS works and the
mentorships will inspire many to continue contributing to open source.
They also open the doors to  professional careers in software
development.

**KDE** remains sustainable. It's been 30 years! The communal project
has grown, become more complex and many people move on. We need new
contributors all the time. We need their vitality and perspective. Our
mentorship programs guarantee we always have an influx of contributors
that help keep KDE alive.

Cheers,

Paul & Johnny on behalf of the GSoC26 coordinating team