Wow. 20 projects accepted for Drupal for the 2007 version of Google Summer of Code. Thanks to all the mentors and especially top GSoC wranglers Robert Douglass and Angie Byron for herding us through this application process.
Not only did this pay off in 20 projects, but the folks that help host drupal.org at the Oregon State University Open Source Lab *also* got two projects accepted which are actually working with Drupal: integrating the Google API into Drupal.
There are some really great projects planned out. Here are some of my favourites:
- RSS / Atom integration: I spent an hour or two with some of the guys from Achieve Internet last week on scoping some patches for the core aggregator code...there is lots of work to be done here, and I think we can get far, fast, by doing a bit of coordination
- Jabber / XMPP: yay! my two favourite communities continue to collide
- Scalability, Load Balancing, and High Availability: Vancouver local hadsie got in, which is great; Scott, want to work out of the Bryght offices for the summer?
- SMS Framework: it's clear that mobile users are continuing to become first class citizens of the web, but that SMS is a great tool for easily integrating into virtually any mobile environment; can I hear the phrase "Twitter clone"?
While much kudos and thanks goes to Google for this, I want to also point out that writing a check is easy: community involvement is much, much harder. Yahoo's involvement, hosting, and sponsorship of the OSCMS Summit 2007 showed a similar (or higher!) level of commitment.
Now all I'm waiting for is the big event at Microsoft to work on really great Sharepoint integration... :P