Students to Enhance Multiple Open Source Projects

Five students will spend this summer putting their coding skills into practice for openSUSE and other projects during this year’s Google Summer of Code.

The international program that matches mentors and students funded 1,315 student projects this year for 201 open source organizations, who will benefit from the active involvement from these new developers.

“We are excited to be selected as a mentoring organization and to mentor these talented, young GSoC students,” said Christian Bruckmayer, one of the openSUSE mentors. “This year’s projects focus on enhancing the capabilities of our open source tools, so that the benefits are shared amongst the open-source ecosystem.”

The student proposals selected this year regarding openSUSE mentoring will help not only the openSUSE Project, but multiple other open-source projects like KDE and the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting (FOSDEM) as well as many others.

In addition to the two student proposals selected for openSUSE’s Open Source Event Management project, which is a self hosted solution to organize conferences, two other students will be developing implementations on OSEM for FOSDEM.

The student projects should enhance the features and capabilities for all the organizations that use the event manager to organize and manage conferences all over the world, Bruckmayer said.

Another student project that will benefit multiple open-source projects is openSUSE’s Ruby on Rails based Travel Support Program application, which helps manage the requests and reimbursements for free open source organizations. openSUSE’s Travel Support Program application was adopted by KDE e.V. to support its Travel Cost Reimbursement initiative. The new features are expected to make the TSP application more useful.

The last development that was selected from the student proposals  for openSUSE were two student projects focusing on Jangouts, which is a videoconferencing tool based on WebRTC and Janus Gateway that provides a self-hosted open source alternative to Google Hangouts. One of the students will look at revamping the User Interface while the other will focus on integrating callstats.io in to Jangouts, which is an analytics tool to help determine how to best improve the quality of audio and video calls.

openSUSE uses 101.opensuse.org to reach out to students who want to participate in GSoC as well as other mentoring programs openSUSE supports.