www.johndbritton.com

I just received the email below on the Google Summer of Code Students mailing list. In 2008 I worked on Gallery as part of Google's Summer of Code. I did the bulk of my work while I was on exchange in Beijing, China. Luckily, at the time, the Summer of Code management application wasn't censored, apparently it is now.

This really hurts. If the Chinese Government doesn't lift the ban on the GSoC site, there will inevitably be a drop in participation by Chinese students. Further, these tech-savvy individuals will likely bypass the firewall by using a proxy and may be in direct violation of the law.

This could all be sidestepped by providing an alternate URL & IP address for GSoC, but this is really just one example of censorship catching more than intended.

I'm a GSoC 2008 student from China. If Google hold SoC this year, I will apply it. But I found I can't access socghop.appspot.com in these days.

In China, sometimes socghop.appspot.com was accessable, but in most time it is unaccessable. Under GFW(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Shield_Project), many websites can not be visited in China. The govenment thought these sites threaten country's stability. Websites like YouTube, Blogspot, and any website with "appspot.com" domain name were blocked.

The govenment have no intention to ban GSoC, the reason of blocking appspot.com is that Google App Engine can be used to set up proxy sever and circumvent the GFW, so the government blocked all sites with domain name "appspot.com".

Yes, it is very ridiculous, but what we can do? There are many Chinese students participated in the past GSoC seasons and made remarkable contribute to Open Source. It would be a heavy losses to Open Source if there are no Chinese(and other undemocratic countries) GSoCers in 2010.

If google can provide an alternative entrance besides socghop.appspot.com and students can commit applications on it, that would be enough.

Madison, Wisconsin based Douglas Whitfield is organizing OpenCamp: an Open Everything Event to be held on April 18, 2009 (that's the same date as Open Everything NYC). If you're in the area you should definitely stop by.

I'm happy to announce the first of two featured speakers for Open Everything NYC 2009. The event is just under a month away and space is limited, so please register. Don't forget to tell your friends!

Leslie Hawthorn

Leslie Hawthorn is a Program Manager for Google's Open Source Programs Office, where she's the Community Manager for the Google Summer of Code community. She recently conceived, launched and managed the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, the world's first global initiative to get pre-university students involved in all aspects of Open Source software development. Leslie has also organized more than 100 open source conferences and hackathons, most held at Google's Corporate Headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA. When not wrangling FOSS developers, she's usually speaking about Open Source, FOSS in education, and community building or writing for the Google Open Source Blog. Prior to joining Google, Leslie got her feet wet in Silicon Valley high tech at a small communications semiconductor startup, where she worked in Marketing and Public Relations. She holds a Honors B.A. in English Language and Literature from U.C. Berkeley and her personal website is http://www.hawthornlandings.org.

From the Mozilla wiki:

Mozilla (in collaboration with ccLearn and the Peer 2 Peer University) launches a practical online seminar on open education. This six week course is targeted at educators who will gain basic skills in open licensing, open technology, and open pedagogy; work on prototypes of innovative open education projects; and get input from some of the world leading innovators along the way.

The most exciting part of this is that Mozilla is teaming up with the Peer 2 Peer University (P2PU), I guess this will be the first official course from the P2PU.

I'm going to Drupalcon DC 2009! I managed to get my ticket at the early-bird price of $125, tickets are now $250 each.

I'm really looking forward to the trip. I've been to the capital of at least twenty other countries, but I've never actually seen Washington, DC. This will be a great opportunity for me to see my nation's capital city.

I'm planning to co-host a BoF session entitled "Guilt in Open Source Projects" with Dave from Advomatic. The session is a spin-off of a session I led at Open Everything Hong Kong, "Guilt in Open Organizations".