Summer of Code and Social Desktop

I've been thinking about Google's Summer of Code program a bit, and since it's having its fifth birthday this year. I thought it would be about time to congratulate the people at the Open Source Programs Office in Mountain View, especially Leslie, Cat, Tiff, Erica and all the others who I had the pleasure to meet at various occasions. Good works, gals!

From a KDE point of view, it's nice to see after 5 years that this Summer of Code works. "Works" means that it does get us a lot of attraction from new talent. There are actually quite some people active within KDE on a regular basis that have found their way into KDE through the Summer of Code programme.
It's good to see how this is managed by the Google staff as well, they're not just throwing money at us, they're actually putting a lot of effort into SoC, and it provides real, tangible and sustainable benefit for Free Software projects. That's money spent well.

The user wins as well, over the past year, we came to ship many of the things that have been done within Summer of Code project. In Plasma for example, there's the extenders that have been introduced with KDE 4.2 and has already become part of the core infrastructure. Rob Scheepmakers is the guy behind extenders, and has since then maintained the codebase and improved it further. Then there's of course Chani, who has also "landed" her Summer of Code project in KDE 4.2. Her project brought plasma widgets to the screensaver. Something I wanted to start using on my desktop machine yesterday so I can suspend it without needing to unlock it first. No dice, turns out it's not as straightforward as I thought (i.e. it would take me more than 20 seconds, which I didn't want to invest at this point). It's probably about 4 lines of javascript as well. I'll buy the person that does it a beer during Akademy on Gran Canaria.

This year, I might mentor a project. There's the Social Desktop proposal. I thought I had added it about a week ago, and wondered why nobody got back to me on that. Turns out that it hadn't actually been saved probably due to an error on my side. I've added it again, and now it actually turns up on the page. I think there are still a couple of days left until the deadline, so maybe someone comes up with a good proposal. I can help a bit by giving feedback for a draft, so you can still get it into good shape before the deadline.
The Social Desktop is actually a very intereting project. It possibly combines many of the interesting KDE4 technologies in a way that should be tangible for the user. Code-wise, it will mostly happen on a rather high level. Part of the work will be integrating the bits that are already there, Decibel for real time communication, Nepomuk for search and indexing, Akonadi for PIM data, but also more "web-enabled technologies" such as GHNS, JOLIE and Attica to get information, content and also more interaction between users going. Update: So turns out that my space-time continuum was out of balance when I wrote the above lines late last night. I had been looking at the 2008 page, and assumed my social desktop idea wasn't there. Some friendly people pointed out that it is 2009, and after a quick check (we have clocks for that in Plasma), I have to concur.

[ Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:00:30 +0100 ] permanent link

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