GSoC 2026: expression of interest

[thibaudcolas]

👋 we’ve not decided whether we’ll join GSoC in 2026. If you want to participate with us, please register your interest with our form: wagtail.org/gsoc-apply

Stay up to date

To know once we participate, we’ll announce on our This week in Wagtail newsletter, Mastodon account, LinkedIn page, Bluesky account, and at any Wagtail events we have in early 2026, and on the Wagtail Slack. And here :)

Timeline

At this stage we don’t even know whether GSoC as a program will be running in 2026, but here’s what to expect based on the 2025 timeline. TL;DR: sit tight until March 2026.

• In early January, we’ll know whether GSoC is happening at all or not.
• In late January, we’ll be able to share whether Wagtail is applying to participate, or not.
• In late February, we’ll be able to share whether we’ve been accepted to participate.
• In mid-March – we’ll have a list of provisional project ideas and start the contributor application period.

2026 projects

At this stage all I can say for sure is we’ll want to have two to four GSoC contributors, with four to ten mentors, representing a good diversity of genders, backgrounds, countries. We’ll be looking for women / non-binary contributors in particular.

As far as hot topics for projects, we forecast: accessibility, sustainability, AI, performance, deployments, code health, security.

[thibaudcolas]

Just published a recap of our 2025 participation for reference! We ended up working on two "large" projects and two "medium" ones, which worked pretty well, so I think if we do participate in 2026 it will be with a similar contingent! The two "medium" projects came as a surprise because they were proposed as entirely original ideas by the contributors.

For interested participants, I would recommend joining our Wagtail Space 2025 event where we will discuss future plans for Wagtail, so you get a sense of what might be good GSoC 2026 project topics. Other than that, we will probably discuss participation plans in February - March 2026!