Can you tell us about Google’s Summer of Code and GHOP programs?
Google Summer of Code is our program to help introduce college and university students to Open Source development. Drupal has been a participant in the program since its inception in 2005, and Angela Byron, a.k.a. webchick, began contributing to Drupal as a GSoC 2005 student. We’re looking forward to running the program once again this year, and interested folks can learn more by checking out our Frequently Asked Questions.
The Google Highly Open Participation Contest is a sister initiative to Google Summer of Code. Aimed at pre-college students over the age of 13, this contest brought together more than 350 students in 40 countries to complete more than 1000 tasks for the 10 participating Open Source projects. Drupal was one of the ten project participating in our pilot offering and the DROP program came about as a suggestion of one of their GHOP students, Charlie Gordon. We’re looking forward to running the contest again, and we’re planning for sometime in the last few months of the year.Stay tuned to the program discussion list for details.
Why does Google support open source projects like Drupal?
It’s no secret that Google uses a lot of Open Source software, and it was important to us to help keep the ecosystem healthy and vibrant. Projects like Drupal allow people to create content rich websites and the more folk creating great content on the web, the better the web becomes. What’s good for Open Source and what’s good for the web is good for Google, and we’re happy to help the Drupal project make the web better.
How does the Knight Foundation work with Drupal?
Knight has the Knight-Drupal Initiative to fund ideas that the Drupal community decides are good for the growth of the Drupal Community, specificially ideas that improve communities by supporting the exchange of information. More information here: http://groups.drupal.org/knight-drupal-initiative
Knight has also launched an incubator site called the Garage for the Knight News Challenge (http://garage.newschallenge.org) that ran in the months leading up to the News Challenge deadline, built in Drupal by PingVision.
Knight also launched a community site called Knight Pulse (http://knightpulse.org) in November 2008, built in Drupal by Development Seed.
How did Knight first get involved in Drupal development?
Knight noticed the many applications to the Knight News Challenge (http://www.newschallenge.org) in Drupal and decided to fund some Drupal projects.
In this interview, Will Brown talks to Chris Jones and Michael Silberman about their company EchoDitto, a local DC tech shop that uses emerging technologies like Drupal to build vibrant online communities. EchoDitto is a silver sponsor of DrupalCon and their team members have also played a part in organizing the conference locally.
Will Brown recently sat down to talk with Chris Bryant about his company Gravitek Labs, a technology consulting company that focuses on open source and Drupal technologies, and a silver sponsor of DrupalCon DC. Listen to the podcast to see what he had to say.
In this podcast, Will Brown talks with Alex Uverick-Ackelsberg about his company ZivTech, a Drupal shop based in Philadelphia, PA and one of the sponsors of DrupalCon.