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!

Coming to OSCON?

We'll be hosting the second annual Summer of Code Community Gathering next week at OSCON 2007, so if you're attending the conference or find yourself in the Portland, Oregon, USA area, come and join us! We've already heard that some of the mentors and students from Adium and SilverStripe CMS will be attending, and the folks at SilverStripe have graciously offered to videotape the BoF. Following some group discussion and the filiming of our collective fifteen minutes of Summer of Code fame - coming soon to YouTube - we'll head out for the ultimate evening open source celebration: that's right, pizza. And free beer!

Access to all OSCON BoFs is free of charge; you just need to register by July 22nd. If you plan to come, post a comment to introduce yourself and we'll keep an eye out for you at the conference and the BoF.

If you'll be attending the entire conference, Google's Open Source Team will be giving many talks and hosting a few other activities. You can check out a full list of all things Googley at OSCON on the Google Code Blog.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Summer Status

While we're used to reading status updates on mailing lists or hammering out next steps in IRC, Sidnei da Silva has done one better; he's recorded a video status report on his Summer of Code project, including an overview of Plone, Zope and his efforts to improve WebDAV in Plone.

Speaking of status, midterm evaluations for the program are coming up in just under two weeks. We're looking forward to hearing more about all the progress our students have made thus far and learning more about mentor-student communications.

We'll be presenting our own Summer of Code midterm status update to the community at OSCON 2007. We hope to see you there!