Google Summer of Code ist a program sponsored by Google that does enable students to work for Open Source projects. GIMP did participate in 2006 and 2008, the results are listed on our Summer of Code wiki page.
We intend to participate again this year, and are currently collecting possible projects at our GSoC 2009 ideas wiki page.
If you think that you might have a possible project, then please go to the IRC channel #gimp on irc.gimp.org and/or the gimp-developer mailing list and present it there. IRC is good for the quick "could this be a project at all" checks, the mailing list is good if you've already got some kind of plan and want to discuss it in detail.
If you would like to mentor any projects, please announce this on the gimp-developer list and/or IRC. And please do reply to any mails sent to you.
Comments
Google Summer of Code 2009
It looks like this year's
It looks like this year's SoC might be very heavy on the GEGL side - and this is good.
Regarding macro recording:
If all of the changes to an image are a modeled by a graph of instructions, then you have sovled most recording needs already. See the examples at http://www.gegl.org/gallery/index.html, the exact same XML can be applied to any image
In GIMP SVN, the projection - what you actually seen in an image window - can optionally be done with GEGL. The color tools can be made to use GEGL as well. This does still not expose the graph to the user in any way, though...
I won't be surprised if 75% or more of our projects this year will be GEGL-related.
Google Summer of Code 2009