Google has announced its annual Summer of Code program (GSoC). The concept is to provide a venue for involving students interested in gaining code development experience in a structured, mentored, directed, real-life (and useful) program. Students sign up, develop proposals for projects, are assigned mentors, and work through summer developing software. Google sponsors the program and provides funding to assist with the project development.

I will be serving as a mentor for GSoC this year, specifically working with some students looking to create a series of Joomla! modules that display various pieces of CiviCRM information. The full list of proposed projects can be found here. The mentors will be reviewing and scoring the proposed projects over the next couple weeks, so we don't yet know exactly what will be accepted and funded yet. There are currently two CiviCRM projects proposed.

I'll provide further updates as the process continues.

The following post is adapted from an email sent to existing clients who currently use CiviCRM.

I'm writing to all my clients who currently use CiviCRM on their website to update them on some exciting news on the horizon, and to fill you in on some of my involvement in the project.

CiviCRM is open source software. What that essentially means is that there is no Fortune 500 company with lots of lawyers trying to protect anyone from seeing and modifying the code. It's open. Anyone can see and modify the code. Because of this openness, open source software has traditionally grown and developed very organically, allowing community involvement and input to push the project in the directions most useful for users.

I was recently introduced to a new online service called FLOSS Manuals (more later on how and why I was introduced to it). It's a fascinating concept: take the collaborative environment benefits of wiki tools, force a degree of refinement (wikis, by their nature, seem to be perpetually incomplete), multi-purpose the output so that the content can be viewed online, exported to pdf, or printed as a book, and then tailor it to the realm of software documentation.

End result? A place where open source software users can gather and develop documentation manuals and truly have an end product suitable for publication.

It seems the preferred methodology for cranking out content is through a book sprint. Basically the idea is that you lock a dozen people in a room for a week, focus entirely on the softare documentation project, and walk away with a very high percentage of the project completed.

Check this out: a competition to create a website in different content management systems. Joomla! vs. Drupal vs. Wordpress.

http://sxsw.com/interactive/talks/panels?action=show&id=IAP0900113

CiviCRM introduced today the creation of a community advisory board, which I was asked to participate in.

I've become a big proponent of CiviCRM over the last year+, and am excited to be able to serve the project in this way. The purpose of the board is basically to bridge the gap between the core development team and the end users and developers. Part of me says this isn't necessary— the core team is incredibly responsive and seems to have an excellent handle on the needs of the community. But I appreciate what they are seeking to accomplish by the formation of this group and hope it meets expectations.

The board's initial task will basically be to come up with a task list— identify the areas of the project that need attention in order to help it advance, grow, and succeed.

Should be fun!