CLAM 1.2 Released

Our friends with the C++ Library and Audio Music (CLAM) project have recently announced their 1.2 release, including substantial new contributions to the code base made by their Summer of Code 2007 students. Andreas Calvo Gomez created a new plugin system, enabling third party algorithms to be distributed separately from the core binaries. Other Summer of Coders created several plugins, including an SMS Synthesizer created by Greg Kellum, and one allowing CLAM to perform voice synthesis and analysis by Abe Kazemzadeh. Both Hernan Hordiales and Roman Goj also contributed code added to the project's main repository, working on SMS transformations and tonal analysis, respectively.

Congratulations to the CLAM project on their release, and many congratulations to Abe, Andreas, Greg, Hernan, and Roman for their contributions to it!

On a side note, you might want to check out the new Google Open Source Blog for news about our Highly Open Participation Contest Grand Prize winners.

It's 9:23 Pacific time / 17:23 UTC and 49° Fahrenheit / 9&deg Celsius here in sunny California. It's starting to feel like summer is just around the corner....

Position Filled

You may recall our posts calling for help from Summer of Coders for the Highly Open Participation Contest or our call to hear more from you about your recent adventures in open source. Alexandre Vassalotti dropped us a quick note, and turns out his latest adventures include helping out with GHOP for the Python Software Foundation. He was one of their students in 2007.

Alexandre writes:

Since the end of Summer of Code, I've continued working with my mentoring organization. I am now one of the few Python core developers working on Python 3000, the next major release of the language. Like everyone else, my contributions are limited to the short amount of free time I have. Recently, I contributed to GHOP by suggesting tasks and mentoring new contributors. According to Titus, our GHOP coordinator, I hold the record for the task with the most comments. :) For me, GHOP is preparation for the next Summer of Code, but this time around I'll be mentoring.

Many thanks to Alexandre for sharing his experiences with us and many kudos to him for his mentorship of other students.

Have you been mentoring for GHOP or are you a former Summer of Code student planning to mentor during future instances of the program? We always love to hear from you; post a comment and let us know!

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.

Meet Your Mentors: Women in Open Source

Prompted by an off-hand remark during an IRC conversation about how many women were mentoring for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, we decided it would be great to chat with several of our women mentors and find out more about how GHOP is going for their communities. During our latest podcast, you'll hear from:

• Noirin Plunkett from the Apache Software Foundation
  
• Addison Berry and Angela Byron from Drupal
• Amy Stephen and Elin Waring from Joomla!
  

You'll likely recognize several of these names as mentors for Summer of Code. Among the many topics we covered, the phenomenal contributions of our GHOP contestants made up the better part of our conversation. You'll also hear more about best practices for encouraging women to participate in open source and some thoughts on women and community management.

Many thanks to Addison, Amy, Angela, Elin and Noirin for joining us.

You can download the podcast in mp3 or ogg formats. Alternatively, you can subscribe to it.

We always love to hear from you, so if you have thoughts on the podcast or tips for helping communities be most welcoming to female contributors, post a comment and share your thoughts with us.

touchEarth

You might remember Pawel from Episode Seven of the Summer of Code podcast or his tech talk on his 2007 project with WinLibre, OpenTouch. We already knew Pawel was rocking and rolling on all things open source, as he was kind enough to put together a page collating statistics from the Google Higly Open Participation Contest using the new Google Chart API. What we didn't know was that he's also the co-founder of the Natural User Interface Group, a community working on different multi-touch screen technologies. The NUI Group develops open source software like touchlib, OpenTouch and the TouchAPI. The community has more than 1000 members worldwide, all of them sharing their experiences with building their own multi-touch screens in the project's forums and IRC channel.


So what is Pawel up to when he's not tracking stats for GHOP or doing NUI community management? Hacking on touchEarth, an application he developed that allows you to control Google Earth using two finger gestures on multi-touch table. touchEarth uses the Google Earth COM API to control some of Google Earth's features, while all the multi-touch screen events are sent to touchEarth from touchlib (or OpenTouch) using the TUIO protocol. Sound cool? Check out the demo video.

Are you performing cool feats of open sourcery? Post a comment and get in touch!

Friday, Fulbright and Rhodes

Earlier this year, we heard that Sarp Centel, one of our 2007 Summer of Coders working with the OpenMRS project, would be attending Georgia Tech on a Fulbright Scholarship. This week, we got some more fantastic news: Wojciech Gryc, who you may remember from our earlier post on Spreading Open Source in Africa, wrote in to let us know that he had just been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. You can read more about Wojciech's accomplishments from the news site of his alma mater, the University of Toronto at Scarborough.

We want to congratulate Sarp and Wojciech on receiving these prestigious scholarships, and wish them every continued success!

And for our final bit of Friday news, those of you wondering about the latest and greatest on the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, check out yesterday's video update on the Google Code Blog.

We hope all of you are as elated by all these happenings as we are. Care to share your thoughts with us in the comments section?

Help Wanted: Open Source for Secondary Schoolers

While this news isn't strictly related to Summer of Code, we felt the community would like to hear about our newest initiative to introduce students to open source development: the Google Highly Open Participation Contest. The contest offers pre-university students the opportunity to contribute code, documentation, localization, testing and more to our ten participating open source projects. In return, our contestants have the chance to win cash prizes, a trip to the Googleplex and the all important t-shirt.

If you'd like to help us with this pilot endeavor, we would love to have you. Since many Summer of Coders were recently new to open source themselves, you are in a perfect position to provide sage advice and a helping hand to our contestants on the contest mailing list. If you're particularly passionate about one of the participating open source projects, why not suggest tasks for student participants to complete? Each project has published guidelines on how to contribute tasks for your reference.

We hope all of you are as excited about the contest as we are, and we hope to have your help in getting these new contributors up to speed. See you on the mailing list!