Bringing innovation and teaching together, the KDE community takes the spirit of Google Summer of Code and keeps building on it to reach even more students. For the ninth year, the KDE community is participating in the Google Summer of Code with 50 student projects. KDE also has three women participating this summer in the Outreach Program for Women run by the GNOME Foundation. As in previous years, the KDE community has organized the 'Season of KDE' for motivated students whose proposals didn't make it in either Google Summer of Code or the Outreach Program for Women.
With so many students and a request for them to blog regularly about their progress, Planet KDE has many Google Summer of Code related posts written by this year’s students. This allows the wider KDE community to follow the work done by the students and comment on it. But this is not the only way the students share what they are doing. At the Akademy conference in Bilbao, many students were present, presenting their work in their own session or as part of the Student Programs Presentation. Students also update the KDE wiki with the status of their projects.
The Google Summer of Code students are working on a wide variety of KDE projects, from components of the basic shell (network management) to the core of that shell itself (dynamic switching between shells based on form factor changes) to end user applications. Some projects move out of the desktop sphere, with a web shop for the popular Krita painting application, as well as a project report tool showing development statistics on KDE sub-projects.
Projects are pushing the boundaries of technology, bringing in openGL and collaborative text editing in KDE applications, and exploring unique interfaces for features like the human-friendly query parser for the Semantic Search technology in KDE.
Since the first Google Summer of Code in 2005, the KDE community continues to push the boundaries of technology. Students discover how the process of collaboration and open innovation results in a great experience, and the IT world gains valuable new participants. And the students in turn get a chance to shine while making a valuable contribution to society!
By Jos Poortvliet, KDE Marketing team
