Google Summer of Code Veteran Orgs: openSUSE

Everything is about the number 10. For our tenth guest post, written by veteran Google Summer of Code Org Admins, the openSUSE folks talk about their 10 successful student projects for summer 2013.

Google Summer of Code 2013 was the sixth year openSUSE participated as a mentoring organization in the program. We were happy to have 10 of our student projects completed successfully. Our students put in a lot of effort writing code, documenting it and in the process, learning a lot over the summer.

Below is a short summary of the work our students completed this summer:
1.) Xystushi created a Git review system. A lot of code has been refactored from the ground up, important bugs fixed and new features have been added.
2.) Kshitij developed tools for AppArmor Profiling. The command line versions have been created for all the tools. There were some setbacks on the YaST based GUI frontend, but the overall project was successful. Kshitij will be working to complete the GUI based tools in the coming weeks.
3.) Akif Khan wrote a standalone application that can perform automatic resizing of File System and Logical Volumes. This tool can be called by the package manager during installation when encountering a low space exception. The tool can also perform automatic resizing if the free space required by a user for a particular volume decreases below a certain level.
4.) The music app for ownCloud that Morris Jobke developed this summer lets you scan, browse and listen to your music. The final polish on the app is scheduled for the next ownCloud release.
5.) Periklis Natansis wrote a new campaign mission for the game Hedgewars, which is about a hedgehog’s journey in the stars to save his home planet. It will be included in the next Hedgewars release.
6.) Gyula Petrovics wrote a MySQL destination driver for syslog-ng.
7.) Tihamér Petrovics created a Redis Destination for syslog-ng.
8.) Shayon Mukherjee worked on creating a Discussion System for the Open Build Service(OBS). The project has already been integrated with the OBS, and is proving very useful to packagers and maintainers. He wrote a series of blog posts at the end of GSoC, detailing his experiences.
9.) Stella Rouzi created the OSEM, Open Source Event Management system. This has system has already been tried and tested during the recent openSUSE Conference in July, and the upcoming openSUSE Summit. The system was well received at the openSUSE Conference, and all visitors got a first hand demonstration on registering, submitting talks, managing schedules, etc. OSEM will be the backbone of future openSUSE Conferences and Summits.
10.) Raghu Nayyar created a User Management Application for ownCloud. The project has been completed and integrated with the ownCloud Code.

Thanks to our awesome students who keep the spirit of open source and open source communities alive. You guys rock!! Many thanks to the mentors who took valuable time out of their busy schedules to assist the students. A lot of appreciation goes to Google for managing the program year in and year out; Google Summer of Code really is an awesome program. We will most certainly apply in 2014 for the 10th year of the program.

By Saurabh Sood, openSUSE Organization Administator

Google Code-in 2013 comes to an end

Google Code-in 2013, our contest introducing 13-17 year old pre-university students to open source software development ended earlier today.

Congratulations to the 334* students from around the world who have been working very hard over the last seven weeks completing 2,100* tasks in the contest. Students completed tasks like writing small pieces of code, creating tutorials to help new users of the software, reporting bugs, writing documentation for the open source projects and hosting information sessions about the projects in their local communities or via Hangouts.

Not only did students gain real world experience working with 10 open source software projects during the contest and applying the skills they learned in their studies, they also learned how to work collaboratively with a community of developers. As students worked on their tasks, there were mentors available to help guide them and teach them new skills and knowledge about how open source software projects work. Students also earned fun prizes like t-shirts and certificates.

We will be announcing the 20 grand prize winners for Google Code-in 2013 on Monday, January 20th on this blog. Each of the 10 open source projects will choose 2 students to be their grand prize winners. These students will receive a trip for themselves and a parent/legal guardian to Google’s Mountain View, CA headquarters for four days this April where they will meet with Google engineers, explore the Google campus and enjoy a day full of adventures in San Francisco.

Congratulations to all of the students who participated in the contest.  We hope you all had fun working with the open source organizations and mentors and continue to stay involved in the community or with other open source projects in the future.

The success of the contest comes not only from the hard work and enthusiasm of the students but also the dedication of the mentors and organization administrators who volunteer their time to help young students learn about open source development and their communities. Thank you to all of you for the many busy nights, weekends and holidays you dedicated to helping this year’s students. This contest would not be possible without all of your passion and enthusiasm for your projects and your desire to excite young minds about open source software development.

In the next few weeks we will post more stats on the contest and snippets about some of the extraordinary work the students completed during the Google Code-in.

Great job Students, Mentors and Organization Administrators!

* The final evaluations are currently being graded, these numbers could increase in the next few days.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs

Polytechnic University of Bucharest GSoC 10 Things event

This week we have a guest post from a mentor from the Liquid Galaxy project describing his experience at the Google Summer of Code “10 things” celebration in Romania along with his presentation about the Liquid Galaxy project and the workshop he held at the event.

When the Open Source Programs Outreach team at Google announced their “10 things” roadshow for the 2014 Google Summer of Code program, I was excited to see what countries they would visit. They approached the Liquid Galaxy project administrators, Andrew “ALF” Leahy, Ben Goldstein, and myself, Andreu Ibanez, about the possibility of doing a presentation of our project at their meetup at the Politechnic University of Bucharest in Romania. We enthusiastically accepted the invitation.

On November 21, the event was held in a majestic hall with a dome roof, a beautiful example of the school’s 160 year history. The room for the main presentation, with two hundred seats and a grand piano in a corner, was perfectly prepared by local Googlers. In time the room was full of students excited about hearing about Google Summer of Code. The day started with a welcome and introductory words from Adina Magda, Dean of the EPB,  Dan Bulucea, Google Romania Country manager, and Googlers Elisabeta Moraru and Gabriela Chiorean.

Next there were presentations by local GSoC mentors and students that had projects in past years of the program. It was encouraging to see that many women were involved in the projects, and it was interesting that women tended to choose the larger, more established open source projects, like KDE or GNOME.

Carol Smith, manager of the Google Summer of Code program, started her presentation by talking about some of the “10 things” Google is doing in 2014 to celebrate the 10th year of the program. The exciting news included a 10% increase in the number of students that will be accepted, 10 more organizations than ever before would be accepted (which means it will be 190) and also a 10% increase in the student stipend.

And among the statistics mentioned about the program, we soon understood why Google chose the Polytechnic University of Bucharest to hold an event - 100 students from the university have been accepted into GSoC over the last 9 years of the program, the second largest number of students from any single university in the history of the program. From the country of Romania there have been 234 student participants and 54 mentors since 2005.

Then it was time for us to present the Liquid Galaxy project. I spent 15 minutes introducing what the Liquid Galaxy is and what kind of different form factors have been explored, complete with nice videos from the Google Mountain View California headquarters and other installations around the world. Also I spent a few minutes introducing the Liquid Galaxy LAB, the joint local initiative we have in Lleida, Spain, that I started a year ago with Escola Politecnica Superior, La Paeria de Lleida City Council, and the Scientific Park. The Liquid Galaxy LAB is a 50 sqm facility equipped with 3 Liquid Galaxy development instances where students from the university develop their projects around Liquid Galaxy and other Google technologies.

Lunch was also great, with a selection of interesting local food, that was thoroughly appreciated by the students. With our energy replenished, it was time to go deep on Liquid Galaxy technology with 20 interested students joining us for a two and a half hour workshop.

We addressed many topics in the workshop and were pleased with our very interactive group that asked lots of questions throughout the entire workshop. Topics included:
• introduction to deep hardware and software internals of the Liquid Galaxy
• introducing the many user interfaces we’ve experimented with and the ones we’re working on, such as Leap Motion controller and Google Glass
• content currently on LG, including Google Earth, Street View, Google Maps, Google Oceans, and other 360 degrees panoramas
• working with web based synchronized contents in browsers across the screens
• ongoing special projects at the Liquid Galaxy LAB such as the FAED drone project that is catching lots of interest, and the Firefighters real time Forest Fire analysis tool, both using the LG as the visualization tool.

Other nice surprises included a couple of live Hangouts with other Liquid Galaxy GSoC 2013 students and mentors from Spain and USA.

At the end of the workshop I explained past GSoC Liquid Galaxy projects with the help from local student Ciocan Mihai. Ciocan introduced his colleagues to his 2013 project, a Hangouts like application using WebRTC technology that gives the Liquid Galaxy the ability to do video multi conferences, having a person on every screen.

And last but not least, a perfect dinner was organized by local Googlers in the old city center, full of great meat, vegetables, beer, and friendship. It was the perfect end for a full day of great experiences, meeting new people, seeing new places, and visiting a University that is really interested in Google technologies.

By Andreu Ibanez, Liquid Galaxy LAB