KOffice

The KOffice folks, who worked under KDE's banner for this year's Summer of Code, have posted an update on some of the cool results of their student's 2007 projects.

Some highlights from new faces:

• Fredy Yanardi added several plugins to the KOffice, including bookmarks and various text transformation tools such as changing case and auto correction.
• Marijn Kruisselbrink has, apparently, accomplished the impossible: you can now edit sheet music from any KOffice document.
• Sven Langkamp worked on new selection visualizations for Krita, building off work done by Emanuele Tamponi, KDE Summer of Coder for 2006.
  

And from old hands:

• Emanuele Tamponi joined us once again this year, working on some significant improvements to color mixing in Krita.
• Pierre Ducroquet, three time Summer of Coder, worked on a full reimplementation of ODF support in KWord. Even better, he plans to keep working on it after the Summer of Code concludes.
  

If you're interested in learning more, including ways the KOffice folks could use more help, cruise on over to Boudewijn Rempt's full write up.

Congratulations to KOffice's mentors and students!

Updates from Eclipse

For our latest podcast, we had a chance to get an overview of all things Summer of Code and Eclipse from Philippe Ombredanne, one of the project's organization administrators and mentors for both 2006 and 2007. Philippe shares with us a bit about the Eclipse Foundation and how the various projects under its umbrella are structured. You'll also get the opportunity to learn about how Eclipse structures its participation in Summer of Code, as well as some of the ongoing contributions of some their 2006 GSoC students. Additionally, Philippe shares some insights into effective cross-project mentoring, discussing some collaborative work done this year which was born from discussions started at last year's mentor summit.

Many thanks to Philippe for joining us!

You can download the podcast in mp3 or ogg formats. Alternatively, you can subscribe to it.

If you have a cross-project mentoring success story or any other thoughts to share, post a comment and let us know.

Enjoy the show!

Summer of Coders at Google: OpenMRS

Dr. Paul Biondich and Dr. Burke Mamlin, mentors for the OpenMRS project, stopped by Google yesterday and treated our employees to an introduction to OpenMRS. You can check out the video of their presentation to learn more about their system design, as well as the intricacies of implementing open systems for the medical field. It's particularly exciting to see how these folks have enhanced their code base using work done by so many other open source projects, code which in turn is now helping those most in need of care receive it.

It's not every day you get to hang out with two doctors who are open source geeks at heart.

Many thanks to Burke and Paul for joining us!

Thanks to Our Mentors

Final evaluations for Summer of Code are in full swing, and as the program winds down for the year we've been having some great discussions on the mentor's mailing list about lessons learned during the program. The majority of these conversations have been overwhelmingly positive, and we're looking forward to rolling the feedback from the mailing list and the program evaluations into useful how-to documentation for mentors.

That said, one of our mentors quite rightly pointed out that mentoring is hard work. Mentoring requires a wide variety of skills, most of them having nothing to do with the quality of code a mentor writes: good communication habits, providing encouragement, giving constructive criticism in an effective and useful manner, and proactively determining which points that seem glaringly obvious to folks involved with the project are non-intuitive for newcomers. Mentoring certainly requires a dialogue and level of social interaction that's not necessarily the standard 'procedure' for a particular open source project.

So, a great big thank you to all of our mentors. Your job is a difficult one, and we truly appreciate all your efforts to make your students and Summer of Code successful.

(Oh yeah, and don't forget to turn in your final evaluations.)

Summer Success

Helping open source projects, large and small, bring in new developers is one of Summer of Code's primary goals, so it's always great to hear that the program has helped decrease a project's bus factor.

I had the privledge of meeting Tim Ansell, one of the lead developers and Summer of Code organization administrators for the Thousand Parsec, at linux.conf.au 2007, and got a chance to learn a bit more about their project. When Thousand Parsec applied to be a mentoring organization for Summer of Code 2007, we were happy to have another mentoring organization from the Southern Hemisphere take part. Plus, open source game development is just plain cool.

I stumbled across Tim's blog today, where he talked about the results of this year's Summer of Code for Thousand Parsec. While Tim has more to say about what SoC has helped his project achieve, the best part for me was:

"With myself recently graduating, the nature of my contributions to the project is going to change and it’s nice to know that others will be helping to keep the project alive."

We're glad we could help Thousand Parsec find new developers, and we've heard similar comments from our other mentoring organizations. If anyone would like to share a story about how Summer of Code has helped with the bus factor challenge, post a comment and let us know.

For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure

We've now got all of our Summer of Code podcasts available in ogg format!

For all those of you preparing for final evaluations on Monday, take a break and enjoy the dulcet tones of these audio offerings from your fellow mentors and students.

You can directly download the podcasts from each link.

• Episode 1 - Drupal
• Episode 2 - The Umit Project
• Episode 3 - The Mono Project
• Episode 4 - Joomla!
• Episode 5 - OpenMRS
• Episode 6 - Desmond Elliott
• Epsiode 7 - Pawel Solyga
• Episode 8 - Adium
• Episode 9 - Ed Baskerville
• Episode 10 - The Toronto Connection
• Episode 11 - Fyodor Vaskovich

Keep your eye out for our next episode, featuring Philippe Ombredanne, mentor and organization administrator for the Eclipse project.

We'll be releasing ogg and mp3 formats concurrently for all future editions.

Enjoy the shows!

Summer of Coders at Google: Fyodor Vaskovich

While you may know him as the developer behind the Nmap Security Scanner, we refer to Fyodor as "the one who took on ten students by himself in Summer of Code 2005 and 2006." For our latest podcast, we had a chance to catch up with Fyodor about life as a third time Summer of Code mentor, as well as some highlights of the accomplishments of Nmap's SoC students, past and present. We also got a chance to hear about some of his work with Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, a new organization in Summer of Code this year, as well as a bit about the Umit Project, which came about under his tutelage in Summer of Code 2005 & 2006.

Many thanks to Fyodor for joining us!

You can directly download the podcast or you can subscribe to it. Have some thoughts on the podcast or a Summer of Coder you'd like to see featured? Post a comment and let us know.

Enjoy the show!

Summer of Coders at Campus Party

Campus Party 11, held in Valencia, Spain, was in full swing two weeks ago, and four Summer of Coders were on hand to participate in the festivities. Each of them gave a talk on their Summer of Code experience, and generally hung out to enjoy the festivities. Google tents anyone?

Laurens Vandeput, student in 2006 and mentor in 2007 for the Joomla! project, and Steffen Pingel, 2006 student for Eclipse working on Mylyn (formerly Mylar), found some cool things to discuss after their talks, and we've heard they may be collaborating on a project soon. Desmond Elliot, 2006 student for the Camino project and returning this year to work with OpenMRS, shared a bit about his love for open source as a vehicle for social change. Kai Blin, three time Summer of Code student with The Wine Project, plans to be a mentor next year, and needless to say we're looking forward to it.

You can check out more about Campus Party, including photos from the talks given by Desmond, Kai, Laurens and Steffen, on Google's Campus Party blog.

Have questions after reading the blog, taking a look at the presentation slides and checking out the pics? Want a Google tent of your very own? Well, we can't get you a tent, but we will make sure that these SoCers answer any questions you post in the comments.

[Note: Posts on Google's Campus Party blog are written in both English and Spanish.]

The Toronto Connection

For our latest podcast, we spoke with four students who are working together on their Summer of Code projects. Three of the students attend the University of Toronto, but Jeff Balogh visited the university at the start of the program to do some project planning with David Cooper, so he's an honorary UT alumni; both David and Jeff are working with mentors from the Python Software Foundation.

Along with David and Jeff, Xiaoyang Guan is also working to improve Dr. Project, focusing on creating a Mylyn plugin (formerly Mylar) for the Eclipse IDE, while David and Jeff are providing enhancements to the ticketing system. Florian Shkurti, working with the Eclipse project along with Xiaoyang, discussed a bit about his project to create a web-based code review tool. Rounding out the crew, we were joined by Greg Wilson, who in addition to work as an Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto is mentor for both David and Xiaoyang, and a repeat mentor for Summer of Code.

David, Florian and Xiaoyang all share space in Greg's lab at UT, and the effects of having a "live" mentor along with real-time conversation and teamwork with fellow students have proved fruitful for collaboration and mutual inspiration. In addition to hearing more about their work for Summer of Code, David, Florian, Jeff and Xiaoyang share some insights into life as a Summer of Coder working shoulder to shoulder with fellow SoCers and the changes this introduces into the typical, online-only dynamic of open source development. David and Jeff also give us more detail about the trials and successes of working together on the same SoC project.

And finally, a special bonus, a few glimpses at some cool stuff that happenned last week at OSCON 2007.

Thanks to David, Jeff, Florian, Greg and Xiaoyang for joining us!

You can download the podcast or subscribe to it. Post a comment and let us know your thoughts on the podcast or the effect of in person collaboration on open source development - we would love to hear from you!

Summer of Coders at OSCON

So we had a few technical difficulties with the video from our OSCON BoF, but our friends at SilverStripe CMS were nice enough to send us a write up of the evening's festivities. About twenty mentors, students and well-wishers convened at the BoF and headed out for pizza, and a merry time was had by all. In addition to the folks you can see in the write up photos, we were joined by Brenda Wallace and Penny Leach of Moodle mentor fame - yes, we had quite the New Zealander contingent - as well as Josh Berkus, organization administrator from Postgresql.

Special thanks to Greg Lund-Chaix of Oregon State University's Open Source Labs for leaving BeerForge 2.0 early to hang out with all of us and make sure we got to our final destination smoothly.

To all those of you who joined us, our sincerest thanks for coming and sharing your Summer of Code joys with us. For those of you who were unable to join us, we raised a glass for you. Needless to say, we're planning the same shindig for OSCON next year, so perhaps we'll see you then!