This year the XWiki project had 5 4 GSOC students (we lost one to FOSSASIA who clicked faster than us!). This is way cool and we're glad that Google is organizing this every year. XWiki has been participating since the beginning (2005 AFAIR).
Every year the XWiki project sends 2 mentors to participate to eh GSOC summit. This year it was Thomas Mortagne and me who got the honor to go.
Quiz: find us on the group picture:
This conference is organized as an unconference. These are the key highlights I gout out of it:
- Google will continue organizing GSOC in the future. Yeah!
- Lots of discussions about Google Code In (for students aged 12-17) and to handle it to the best for organizations. This convinced us to register the XWiki project to participate and... we just got selected 2 days ago. If you're interested to participate, see the XWiki Code-In page. I'm really curious to see how it'll go.
- I proposed a session on "Wikis: what's next", which turned into a "What is XWiki and why is it different from other wikis" Incidentally this got me thinking about how to best express what XWiki is in one sentence. So far I've found the following:
- View 1: Bring the concepts of wiki (collaboration on same content, edit+save, history+rollback, links) to application development.
- View 2: A runtime web development platform. The default wiki you get is just one example (Similar to Eclipse IDE vs eclipse platform).
- View3: Provide ability to add semantics to content: from free form data to structured data. Pages can contain free form or structured data / metadata, and control how it's displayed.
- View 4: A web application server for content-related applications i.e. Provides all components / building blocks to easily create web applications.
- Extremely well organized by Google. And good food and lots of choice (I'm vegetarian). I'm vegetarian but I love chocolate and this was heaven (all attendees brought chocolate!):