Spreading the Summer Love
By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source TeamGoogle Summer of Code™ is in full swing, and the outpouring of community support has been phenomenal. Less than two weeks after announcing the program for 2008, our program information flyer was translated into over 35 languages, from Croatian to Kinyarwanda. We've also heard from several students and mentors that they're working on spreading the summer love to their local communities. Here are a few highlights:
- Adriano Monteiro Marques and some of his co-conspirators from the Umit project toured several universities in Brasil to let students know about the program. They also created a program video in both English and Brasilian Portuguese.
- Alex Pantaleev added a call for students to check out the program to his last class at Ohio State University.
- The Beijing LUG kindly localized our program presentation and are busy spreading the word about Summer of Code in Chinese universities; the Free Software Initiative of Japan was also kind enough to localize the presentation and spread the word.
- The folks at DevSeed are hosting an information session in Washington, D.C., USA to help students learn more about contributing to Drupal through Summer of Code.
- Louis Landry from the Joomla! project writes that today they'll be sending information to various Computer Science Departments throughout the United States about participating in Summer of Code.
- Dr. Titus Brown was kind enough to organize an impromptu meet up session at Michigan State University for all takers, with a hopeful eye towards finding a few more Python contributors.
Numerous other students have written to let us know that they've blogged about the program, encouraged their friends to apply and given talks at their universities and local user groups.Many thanks to all of you for your efforts to help us grow the Summer of Code community. If you're out and about evangelizing the program, we'd love to hear from you; post a comment and let us know what you've been doing.