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Have you considered Google's Summer of Code? https://code.google.com/soc/

I just want to second this. I participated in GSoC 2009 and absolutely loved it. I'm from the US and worked with 2 mentors in Switzerland, a student in India and a student Colombia.

We worked on a package management system like APT for Windows, and while it was a bit unrealistic for 3 students in 3 months, I learned more in those 3 months than entire years at college.

Edit: There's also a Ruby Summer of Code in the same respect as the Google one. http://rubysummerofcode.org/

Have you ever checked out Chocolatey? Interested how it compares to what you were working on. ( http://chocolatey.org/ )

That looks pretty similar. We were building a GUI tool for it and a really diverse hosting service that would let you torrent the packages and what not.

I will probably apply this summer, although working for a commercial project, in a close-knit team would be really interesting for me :) Also GSoC doesnt offer a lot of opportunities for Rails development.

Depends on where you look. Last year (this year, actually) I saw several openings looking for Rails experience I think.

Besides, the projects are pretty open about it. You can approach a project and come up with your own ideas. Not only this makes you more noticeable, it gives you the flexibility to do what you really want.

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