OpenUsability

Wednesday, April 29, 2009 at 10:13 AM

Inspired by Google Summer of Code™, the OpenUsability Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. Students experience the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects while getting into FLOSS development.

If you are a student of design, usability, human factors, or other HCI-related field and you are interested in working on an open source project, you could work with an experienced usability mentor on a fun and interesting design project! As a bonus for working 10-15 hours a week between June 1 and August 31, there is a $1000 USD internship stipend at the end of the project.

The OpenUsability Season of Usability will be supporting 10 students to work on 10 open source projects during the June 1 - August 31 2009 season.

* Amarok
* Drupal
* Gallery
* GeneMANIA
* GNOME
* Kadu
* KOrganizer
* OLM
* SemNotes
* Ubuntu

Student applications are due May 20 2009. See http://season.openusability.org/index.php/projects for more information on the projects, student requirements, and how to apply. Questions about the projects or application process may be directed to students@openusability.org.

Openmoko

Openmoko™ is a project dedicated to delivering mobile phones with an open source software stack. Openmoko is currently selling the Neo FreeRunner phone to advanced users and will start selling it to the general public as soon as the software is more developed.

Writting apps for openomoko is greatly simplified by use of python and GTk, an example script would be;

import gtk

#create a (nonvisible) window
w = gtk.Window()

#create a button (not yet on any window)
b = gtk.Button('Hello')

#put the button on the window
w.add(b)

#create a silly callback function
def hello(target):
print 'Hello world'
exit()

#make the button call the callback when pressed
b.connect('clicked', hello)

#make the window display
w.show_all()

#start processing screen events
gtk.main()

Openmoko is a project which encompasses two related sub-projects, with the combined aim of creating a family of open source mobile phones.^[1] The project was founded by FIC.

The first sub-project is Openmoko Linux, a Linux-based operating system designed for mobile phones, built using free software.

The second sub-project is the development of hardware devices on which Openmoko Linux runs. The first device released was the Neo 1973,which was followed up by the Neo FreeRunner on 25 June 2008. Unlike most other mobile phone platforms, these phones are designed to provide end users with the ability to modify the operating system and software stack. Other Openmoko-supported phones are also available.

On 2009-04-02 Openmoko canceled planned phones and will probably concentrate on other kinds of hardware,but will still support and sell the current Neo FreeRunner.

More info can be found at http://wiki.openmoko.org/wiki/Main_Page

Openchange

OpenChange aims to provide a portable Open Source implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server and Exchange protocols.

Exchange is a groupware server designed to work with Microsoft Outlook, and providing features such as a messaging server, shared calendars, contact databases, public folders, notes and tasks.

Two main aspects are;

• Provide interoperability with Exchange protocols.
  

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  This is the MAPI library development purpose (libmapi). MAPI stands for Messaging Application Programming Interface and is used within Microsoft Exchange. The OpenChange implementation provides a client-side library which can be used in existing messaging clients and offer native compatibility first with Exchange server; and in a near future with OpenChange server. Novell Gnome Evolution and KDE Akonadi (KMail, Mailody) are using the OpenChange MAPI library to access Microsoft Exchange servers natively.



• Provide a transparent replacement to Microsoft Exchange Server with native Exchange protocols support and direct communication with Microsoft Outlook.

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  This basically means that OpenChange server won't need any plugin installation in Outlook. The server is tighly linked to Samba4 since it is developed as an endpoint module for smbd (the samba server daemon) and is part of the mapiproxy project, an Exchange proxy which can act as a transparent gateway and/or progressively and seamlessly replace an Exchange server with openchange.

The Openchange project was founded in 2003 at EPITECH by Julien Kerihuel in the context of his Epitech Innovative Project. Julien is the project manager, lead developer. The OpenChange team is now made up Samba, KDE developers and Epitech students.

During this years Gsoc 2009, Three students

Student	Project	Mentor	Status
Ryan Lepinski	Exchange2Ical tool	Brad Hards	accepted
andrey yakubovich	Thunderbird Integration with OpenChange	jelmer vernooij	accepted
billy okal	GRAPHICAL FRONT END FOR OPENCHANGE	julien kerihuel	accepted

will be working on different projects for Openchange in the above projects over the summer.

GSOC 2009: Results are out, its time for community bonding

So what is this community bonding all about?

One of the biggest changes to the program this year is the inclusion of nearly two extra months in the program timeline. "We got some great feedback from our students and mentors last year that three months is often too little time to read necessary documentation, write code and participate in the organization's community in-depth. Since our not so secret desire is for our students to stick around and keep contributing to their organization's code base long after the program ends, we figured we'd give you some extra time to get up to speed on the community side." Says Leslie Hawthorn.

In practice, the community bonding period is all about, well, community bonding. Rather than jumping straight into coding, you've got some time to learn about your organization's processes - release and otherwise - developer interactions, codes of conduct, etc. We also figured it would be easier to socially engage with your fellow developers when the pressure to ship isn't looming in your vision. I know few folks who didn't lurk in a project's IRC channel for weeks or even months before submitting their first patch, let alone saying hello and getting to know the other folks in the channel.

If you've already worked with with your organization's code base and developers, great! Take this time to help out your fellow students who haven't. There's a great deal of undocumented lore in every community, and your previous experience can be invaluable to them as they get started.

And why aren't you mentoring already? ;)

Intelligent Data Interpreter

For the retrieval and analysis of especially large amounts of geo-spatial data the international standardization committee Open GeoSpatial Consortium (OGC) now published the "Web Coverage Processing Service" (WCPS) as a worldwide standard. WCPS defines a computer language, which for the first time ever can retrieve sensor, image, and statistics raster data from remote geo data servers, independently of data format and server programming. In addition, WCPS allows the selection, linkage and analysis of the data directly with each inquiry. Developer of the intelligent geo data retrieval service is Peter Baumann, Professor of Computer Science at Jacobs University.

I currently work on this project as assistant Programmer in C++, and this is really good news for us in the team.