Many things wonderful and Open Source are happening in Zurich, Switzerland these days. Most recently, Joël Fisler of the OLAT (Online Learning and Training) project wrote in to let us know about the meetup held at the University of Zurich to celebrate the conclusion of Google Summer of Code™ 2008. Joel writes:
2008 was the first year that the OLAT Learning Management System (LMS) and e-Learning Markup Language (eLML) were accepted into the Summer of Code program. All the students successfully finished their projects and presented their work at our program closing party. After two hours of presentations and discussions — one as a conference call from Germany and two students via video from India — the student and mentors celebrated with barbecue and beer until late at the Irchel campus. The presentations are available online as video streams.
OLAT's 6.1.x release will contain the results of Udit Sajjanhar's iCal Calendar Feed project, as well as Maurus Rohrer's work on an OLAT LDAP authentication module. The code from OLAT's two eLML student projects, Thomas Linowsky's eLML template generator and Alberto Sanz's work on DocBoook conversion for eLML lessons, will be released later this month. We're anticipating that the work done by our other four students, Thomas Bernhart, Sergio Trentini, Marcel Karras and Mayank Jain, will be published in our 6.2 release, and we're already prototyping against their code.
It's not all Summer of Code and barbecue, though. The OpenExpo Conference kicks off this week on Wednesday, September 24th, and our very own Brian "Fitz" Fitzpatrick will be delivering Do You Believe in the Users? on Thursday morning. Finally, some of the organizers of OpenExpo are also spearheading Hackontest, a 24 hour programming competition between teams developing for three Open Source projects as selected by community participants via online voting. Developer teams will work furiously to add features to OpenLieroX, sK1 and TYPO3, with the results of the 24 hour sprint reviewed by a panel of celebrity judges from the Open Source community. Fitz will be on hand to weigh in, as will Google Open Sourcerers Jeremy Allison of the Samba project, Alexander Limi, co-creator of Plone and Bram Moolenaar, author of Vim.
Should you find yourself in the area, please stop in to say hello. If not, Happy Hacking wherever you might find yourself!
