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?

Summer of Coders at Google: OpenMRS

Dr. Paul Biondich and Dr. Burke Mamlin, mentors for the OpenMRS project, stopped by Google yesterday and treated our employees to an introduction to OpenMRS. You can check out the video of their presentation to learn more about their system design, as well as the intricacies of implementing open systems for the medical field. It's particularly exciting to see how these folks have enhanced their code base using work done by so many other open source projects, code which in turn is now helping those most in need of care receive it.

It's not every day you get to hang out with two doctors who are open source geeks at heart.

Many thanks to Burke and Paul for joining us!

For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure

We've now got all of our Summer of Code podcasts available in ogg format!

For all those of you preparing for final evaluations on Monday, take a break and enjoy the dulcet tones of these audio offerings from your fellow mentors and students.

You can directly download the podcasts from each link.

• Episode 1 - Drupal
• Episode 2 - The Umit Project
• Episode 3 - The Mono Project
• Episode 4 - Joomla!
• Episode 5 - OpenMRS
• Episode 6 - Desmond Elliott
• Epsiode 7 - Pawel Solyga
• Episode 8 - Adium
• Episode 9 - Ed Baskerville
• Episode 10 - The Toronto Connection
• Episode 11 - Fyodor Vaskovich

Keep your eye out for our next episode, featuring Philippe Ombredanne, mentor and organization administrator for the Eclipse project.

We'll be releasing ogg and mp3 formats concurrently for all future editions.

Enjoy the shows!

Summer of Coders at Campus Party

Campus Party 11, held in Valencia, Spain, was in full swing two weeks ago, and four Summer of Coders were on hand to participate in the festivities. Each of them gave a talk on their Summer of Code experience, and generally hung out to enjoy the festivities. Google tents anyone?

Laurens Vandeput, student in 2006 and mentor in 2007 for the Joomla! project, and Steffen Pingel, 2006 student for Eclipse working on Mylyn (formerly Mylar), found some cool things to discuss after their talks, and we've heard they may be collaborating on a project soon. Desmond Elliot, 2006 student for the Camino project and returning this year to work with OpenMRS, shared a bit about his love for open source as a vehicle for social change. Kai Blin, three time Summer of Code student with The Wine Project, plans to be a mentor next year, and needless to say we're looking forward to it.

You can check out more about Campus Party, including photos from the talks given by Desmond, Kai, Laurens and Steffen, on Google's Campus Party blog.

Have questions after reading the blog, taking a look at the presentation slides and checking out the pics? Want a Google tent of your very own? Well, we can't get you a tent, but we will make sure that these SoCers answer any questions you post in the comments.

[Note: Posts on Google's Campus Party blog are written in both English and Spanish.]

Summer of Coders at Google: Desmond Elliott

You've probably already heard about all the cool stuff you can do if you visit our Mountain View, California USA Headquarters: help yourself to a delicious free lunch, check out our replica of SpaceShipOne or take a look at our corporate solar panel installation. If you're a Summer of Coder, though, you're likely to be talked into a recording a podcast.

Desmond Elliott visited a few weeks ago and I got to catch up with him about his work on the Camino project for SoC 2006 and his plans for working with OpenMRS this year. Desmond also has the usual sage advice for would-be Summer of Code students and some thoughts on our first SoC podcast with Angie Byron from the Drupal project.


You can directly download the podcast or subscribe to the podcast.

Enjoy the show!

The OpenMRS Project

In our latest podcast episode, we got the chance to chat with Paul Biondich, mentor and organization administrator for the OpenMRS project. You'll get a chance to learn from Paul about the history of OpenMRS, life as a brand new organization in Summer of Code, and the social change uses of open source in developing nations. You can also learn ways the project could use more help from the open source community.

Many thanks to Paul for joining us.

You can directly download the podcast or you can subscribe to the podcast. We love feedback, so post a comment and let us know what you think.

Enjoy the show!