Summer of Code at linux.conf.au

If you find yourself in Melbourne, Australia next week, Google will be hosting a student party as part of our planned festivities for linux.conf.au 2008. All Summer of Code students and mentors are welcome to attend. The party is open to any high school or university student who'd like to join us, so bring your friends! For those attending the conference, the student party is just one of the great things we've got planned for LCA; you can find full details on the Google Code Blog. It would also be wonderful to see several SoCers in the audience for my talk on Google, Open Source and Google Summer of Code so we can give all of you a round of applause.

We'll also be showcasing Summer of Code and the Highly Open Participation Contest at LCA's aptly-named Open Day, which is open to the public. Attendance is free of charge, so stop by with anyone you'd like to introduce to the the open source community.

We hope to see all of you there. If you'll be attending the conference, post a comment and let us know so we can keep an eye out for you.

Summer of Coders Down Under

So it's not summer Down Under at the moment, but we've got a great showing of Aussie's feeling the coding heat! We have twelve Aussie students again this year, joined by over 50 would-be program mentors.

Of particular note, we have a Summer of Coder this year who owns one of the only two XO-1's in all of Australia. Joel Stanley, who was kind enough to share a pint with me at linux.conf.au 2007, will be spending some time at One Laptop Per Child's offices in Cambridge, working on the charger units for the XO-1. You can read more about Joel's journey as an SoCer on his blog.