Google's Summer of Code is now accepting project proposals. One of the sponsoring organizations, who mentor students, this is year is Ruby On Rails
Last year, as you may recall, Rails got thread safety and a new core committer thanks to our participation in the Google Summer of Code program under the auspices of Ruby Central. This year, we're pleased to announce, Ruby on Rails has been accepted into Google Summer of Code as a sponsoring organization in its own right.
A list of possible project ideas for Ruby on Rails includes RubySpec improvements (improving the specifications for Ruby 1.9.x), fast debugging on Ruby 1.9, and many others.
Codehaus is another mentoring organization among other things for JRuby:
Question: Which organization is JRuby participating under?
Answer: JRuby will participate under both the "Rails" organizations and the "Codehaus" organization. Feel free to submit to both, and we'll try to get them through whichever makes sense.
The list of possible projects includes JRuby support for the XML library Nokogiri, support for environments like JME or Android, reviving the ParseTree support, a fast debugger for JRuby and more.
InfoQ has coverage of Ruby at Google of Summer of Code in previous years.