Since yesterday, I received many interesting questions regarding Google Summer of Code in the view of students. To help all padawans to apply Google Summer of Code 2008 successfully, I summarize below 10 steps. If you are still in doubt, please leave your questions somewhere, my e-mail, Twitter, IM and even here.

1. We are in the last day of February. The real schedule for students to start applying applications is on March 24, 2008. That means you have 24 days from now on to find the right mentoring organization. However, there is no the list of mentoring organizations for this year yet. You may find some interesting organizations in the list of previous year. If you have no idea at all, please give Drupal a chance.
2. I hope you find the mentoring organization that looks very you. Now you are in the 2nd step which you have to learn about that mentoring organization. The must thing you have to do is to use that open source project on your desktop/laptop/server.
3. After using that software for a while, the thing you must find out is its weakness. Surf their forums, mailing list, irc log and any other community channels. Search for blog entries mentioning that mentoring organization and their project to find what they really want to happen.
4. At this step you should know what you are going to do in this summer. The most wanted feature is the thing you should do. So you need to learn more about that open source project you are going to work on. I don't force you to learn coding in 2 weeks. You just need to know the basic concept regarding how it works, basic APIs, programming style, programming languages, programming environment, tools and etc.
5. I think you are ready to think about how to solve that weakness in this summer. There are so many weaknesses. Please choose just only one reasonable feature. If that feature seems too small for summer, you may consider to group a set of features to create a big theme of them. Remember that they don't want you to work 24 hours a day 7 days a week to finish this project in summer. You have to limit scope to make it possible to finish your project in this summer.
6. Now it's time to write a good proposal. There is no fix format or template to write a proposal. It's all up to you. I recommend you to follow this howto written by a drupaller.
7. After you get a good proposal, you may ask your friends to review it. Comments are the most valuable thing for proposal. Don't be shy. It's a chance to improve your proposal quality.
8. If you still have time, I strongly recommend you to prepare a kind of demonstration. I mean just to visualize your idea in graphical figures. Perhaps they are just mockup or static images or partial working code. It would be nice if you show your capability to finish this project in summer.
9. You are almost done. Don't forget that you have to submit your proposal as fast as possible. Mentors see all proposals immediately. They read your proposal and they may give your valuable comments to improve. After some time, they give you a score. If you submit earlier, your proposal will likely to get higher score. It will benefit you in case there are other proposals in same topic.
10. Don't forget to spread the word! Flyers are also available. There is a Thai translation for you! It was translated by markpeak.

Good luck to you all.