GNOME + Summer of Code + Thanks

Google Summer of Code 2007 is officially over. I think it’s a good moment to give a summary of the participation of GNOME in SoC this year.

  • A pool of SoC project ideas was brainstormed and triaged in l.g.o. The triaging and prioritization of the pool improved a lot the quality of the information we provided to the interested students.
  • We received 174 proposals. Lots of duplicates but quite many good quality proposals.
  • 29 proposals were accepted. Of those, 2 were dropped in the middle-term evaluation. The final evaluation hasn’t been done yet but I’m quite confident that almost all projects have succeeded in different ways and levels. Some projecs were about development of new applications and others about new features on existing software modules. Some projects results will be available very soon in GNOME 2.20!
  • The students were requested to send weekly progress reports to gnome-soc-list. If you want to check how the projects evolved, have a look at the mailing list archives.
  • Some of the SoC students had their blog feeds added to Planet GNOME. Their blog posts had a special SoC mark.
  • Around 14 SoC students attended GUADEC this year.

My big and special thanks go to…

  • the GNOME SoC admins (Vincent, Behdad and Christian) who contributed as much as they could to make SoC happen in GNOME.
  • the project mentors who did an excelent and important job on helping the students to achieve their goals and to get involved with the GNOME community.
  • the SoC students who gave important contributions to GNOME in terms of code, time and passion. I really hope to have all of them as active GNOME contributors from now on.
  • the Google SoC organizers who made all this possible.

Being a SoC admin this year was a very nice experience for me. So, thanks to everyone involved! Let’s make GNOME SoC rock even more in 2008! Woohoo!

Life + GNOME + Music

For some reason, It’s been about 2 weeks that I feel very tired all the time. I guess this is a combination of work load and post-mastering. Unfortunately, because of that, I’ve been a little bit away from my usual GNOME activities. I guess I’ll be 100% back from next week on.

Congratulations to all GNOME contributors for the project’s 10 years anniversary! I consider myself a quite recent contributor. IIRC, my first contribution to the project was in September 13, 2004. It was a small patch that added save support for the file selection dialog in zenity. Glynn was zenity’s maintainer at that time. Actually, (I don’t know if he knows that) Glynn is definitely my primary GNOME hero because it was him who brought me inside the project and the community. Without his support in my first contributions, I don’t know if I would be so active (and passionate) to the project today. Thank you dude!

As a relaxing activity, I’ve been making some sort of research on the roots of jazz and funk. So, on the jazz side, I’ve been listening to the fundamentals of Duke Ellington, Max Roach, Charles Mingus, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Roy Haynes, and others. On the funk side, Earth, Wind & Fire, Kool and the Gang, Funkadelic, Parliament, and others. I’m really willing to buy the Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary DVD box. I’ve watched some episodes some time ago and it’s just amazing!

GNOME Roadmap – Call for Update

As you probably know, according to our development schedule, we are officialy feature-frozen now. Therefore, it’s time to cleanup and update our Roadmap to reflect the actual result of our development work in the 2.19/2.20 feature set.

We kindly ask you check the roadmap[2] of the modules you maintain. If there are features that were not implemented for 2.20, please move those to GNOME 2.22 section accordingly. In case there are some features missing there, please add those to the respective section.

You can either directly edit the wiki page or reply us with the new roadmap information.

It’s very important to cleanup and update the GNOME Roadmap as soon as possible so that it can be used as a reliable source of information for writing the GNOME 2.20 release notes.

Update: If you want to update your module-specific roadmap wiki page as well, feel free to do so. This will save you some time later for sure.

It’s over!

Yestarday, I defended (via audio-conference) my mastering thesis entitled “Software Livre e produção colaborativa na Internet: um estudo de caso dos instrumentos de comunicação no Projeto GNOME” (in english it would be something like “Free software and collaborative production in Internet: a case study of the communication instruments used in GNOME Project”). I was approved! It’s over! Now I have master degree in Contemporary Culture and Communication. Wohoo! :-)

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