Holding Pattern for Now (long, but informative)

[Leslie Hawthorn]

Hello everyone,

Many of you enthusiastically said you'd help out when I let you know about all the upcoming opportunities to spread the word about Google Summer of Code.[0] I'm writing to give the community an update about where we are right now so you see the reasons for our "holding pattern."

The 2010 logo has been finalized and we are awaiting the final artwork files from our designer. Once we get that, we can get our program YouTube channel [1] spiffed up and you can use it any videos you'd like to make. The logo being completed gates the creation of our 2010 flyer template, but again that should be coming to you very soon. We'll let you know as soon as the files are posted. 

(That being said, if you want to make videos or screen casts now, don't wait for the new logo unless you really think you need it. Just let us know about the video and whether you posted it online to our student programs channel yourself or if there's a YouTube video we can favorite in our channel. Note: if you are not a GSoC alum, you cannot post to our channel directly.)

As for updating both http://socghop.appspot.com and http://code.google.com/soc/, we are in a holding pattern there awaiting feedback from our legal team. Each year we need to get approval for all program documentation like our Terms of Service, participant agreements and FAQs. While we could update just the front information pages of these sites now, then there would be some information on the site that refers to 2010 but all FAQs and program documentation would only be available for 2009. I think that would cause a lot of confusion so I'm going to make sure we do the updates in one go. We will post to this list once that has been done.

A few of you have already mentioned that you plan to schedule GSoC info sessions at your campuses. Please go ahead and schedule them and let me know about them off-list. We want to add them to the program calendar [2] as soon as we can. The program calendar should be updated with this year's time line in a day or two, and again we will post to this list once it is done. 

Last but not least, a big thank you to Joel Sherill and Pawel Solyga for once again offering to update our program presentation template. For all those of you who offered to create presentations or modify the template, please do work your magic once we've had the opportunity to publish Joel & Pawel's work (again, gated by our new logo and the ability to post our FAQs online - much info. from the FAQs is integrated into the presentation template).

Any questions, please fire away.

[0] - http://groups.google.com/group/google-summer-of-code-discuss/browse_thread/thread/33f783acdf353fba

[1] - http://www.youtube.com/user/googOSPOstudntprgrms

[2] - http://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/google.com/embed?src=gsummerofcode%40gmail.com&ctz=America/Los_Angeles

Best,

LH

--
Leslie Hawthorn
Program Manager - Open Source
Google Inc.

http://code.google.com/opensource/

I blog here:

http://google-opensource.blogspot.com - http://www.hawthornlandings.org