Live Waving at OSCON 2010

With OSCON underway, we're excited about the opportunities that many of us have to present at the conference and we've taken some time to prepare resources for OSCON attendees to use Google Wave to "live wave" during the event.

If you're not familiar with live waving, it's a way of capturing what is occurring at a live event in real time on a wave. It’s similar to live blogging, but provides a smoother experience for the publishers and viewers. For example, you can take a look at the live wave that was used to capture the keynote address at this year's Google I/O conference.

We've put together the following resources for OSCON:

• A public wave that users can use to view an index of all OSCON sessions, with a corresponding link to a live wave for each session (http://bit.ly/OSCON2010LiveWaves)
• A "Live Waving 101" introduction wave for users to learn about live waving (http://bit.ly/LiveWaving101)

If you'll be attending OSCON, we would like to ask for your help in getting the word out about the live waves. You can let your fellow attendees know about the waves by tweeting, waving, or emailing the following link to folks: http://bit.ly/OSCON2010Waves. Everyone can contribute and we encourage you to join in on the live waves -- or start your own for one of the hundreds of sessions.

We think that live waves will serve as a great resource for attendees to share information and to connect in real time. If you want to learn more about Wave, please join us for Joe Gregorio and Dan Peterson’s talk, “Open Source Google Wave: Building Your Own Wave Provider” at 5:20 PM on Thursday or for the “Wave - Open Source and Open Protocols” Birds of a Feather (BoF) session at 8 PM on Thursday.

By Andrés Ferraté, Developer Advocate Team

Google Summer of Code BoF at USENIX

USENIX is a technical organization that has a lot of community members associated with our open source efforts as well as lots of strong ties to the research community. A couple weeks ago I attended the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC). Googler Dave Presotto was a member of the program committee. ATC is a federated conference that brings together researchers and developers working in a wide variety of focus areas. We love to support the members of this organization in their efforts throughout the year. Among the presentations I enjoyed most were the one on robotic honeybees, another on power usage in smart phones, and really enjoyed the keynote on concurrency from Ivan Sutherland.

We held a Google Summer of Code™ Birds of a Feather (BoF) meetup on Thursday night after the conference reception. We talked about Google Summer of Code over ice cream and beer well into the evening. In all we had about 25 attendees, many of whom hadn’t heard of Google Summer of Code before. It was great to tell some people new to the program about it and also to hear from those who have participated about how its changed their lives. A great time was had by all; we even ended up closing the place down that evening.

Don’t miss the next Google Summer of Code BoF at OSCON in just a couple weeks!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team

Google Summer of Code 2010: Meet The Students and Mentors!

Following up on my post from a few weeks ago, I’d like to give you all some more statistics about our Google Summer of Code™ program participants this year.

• We have 69 student countries represented this year. New countries represented by students include Jamaica, Morocco, and Cambodia.
• For the first time we have mentors from Chile, South Africa, Taiwan, and Peru.
• We have mentors from 52 different countries this year.
• We had 3,464 students submit a total of 5,539 proposals in all. Last year we had 5,885 proposals submitted by 3,496 students.
• The open source organizations participating this year received an average of 36 proposals to review. We have 150 participating organizations this year.

We accepted 1,026 of those proposals to become full Google Summer of Code participant projects this year. This is 26 more than we had planned for but there were so many great applications this time that we just couldn't stop at 1000. We have 943 mentors for the students’ projects this year, which means we don’t have quite a 1:1 ratio of students to mentors; some organizations choose to co-mentor students or have the whole organization mentor all the students who participate.

Midterm evaluations are almost upon us. Check out the timeline to see what’s coming up for Google Summer of Code!

By Carol Smith, Open Source Team