www.johndbritton.com

I'm in San Francisco for the month of June getting ramped up at my new job with Twilio and it just so happend that Google hosted a Summer of Code Meetup at their office just a few blocks down the road.

I joined a group of about a dozen others, including Carol Smith and Cat Allman from Google's Open Source Programs Office. There were GSoCers from all over California, including two exchange students and one who came all the way from Guadalajara, Mexico.

We started the event off just after 3PM with introductions and some background info on the various projects for GSoC 2010. There was one other GSoC alum from 2008, João Antunes, who worked on a file transfer protocol for SIP Communicator.

After João shared his experiences and advice I talked a bit about my experience working on a Summer of Code project while I was living in China. In addition I gave three lightning talks on projects I'm working on after GSoC.

I started with an interactive demo of Twilio followed by a Q&A on the technology. There were a lot of great questions and there seemed to be a very high level of interest. After I finished up with Twilio, I shared an update on Mozilla's Drumbeat initiative which naturally segued into a discussion on P2PU and the Open Web Craft project.

After my presentation, a few guys from Scripped gave advice on communication and it's importance in project management.

Carol was super nice and gave us a tour around the office. We got some free food from the micro-kitchen and rode the Google Slide.

We rounded out the day with a trip to a pub on the waterfront overlooking the Bay Bridge. Overall, it was a pretty sweet day.

Flickr Set

UPDATE: Guest post on Google Open Source Blog.

Yesterday, I posted "More Than Code, It's a Community Too" on the Google Open Source Blog. The post is about my recent experience with GSoC students in India, go check it out!

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.

The Gallery team has announced the selected students for the 2008 Summer of Code on GMC (gallery.menalto.com). I am one of two lucky students to be selected. The other student, Paul Hinze, will be working on Facebook/Flickr Style Image Region Based Tagging.

My application to Google's 2008 Summer of Code program has been accepted, see below: