Thorsten's Weblog

Following the original announcement, more than 70 students applied to the Go OpenOffice project for the Google Summer of Code. I was truely impressed, and want to say “thank you!” to all that took the sometimes considerable effort to write a good application.

Choosing six projects among those many was not easy; but I think the collective mentors did an outstanding job selecting both excellent students and relevant tasks – so I’m happy to announce this year’s Go OpenOffice GSoC participants (in order of their last name):

Andrés Correa Casablanca will work on performance improvements

Jesús Corrius will have Win32 OOo cross-compile under Linux

Maja Djordjevic will add Hyperlink/Reference navigation buttons

Dona Hertel will extend the functionality of the templates in Impress

Tzvetelina Tzeneva will improve OOo Writer’s document comparison

Jonathan Winandy will add an Ocropus OCR integration to OOo

Yay to the successful applicants!

To all those who applied, but have not been selected: the competition was fierce, I can assure you, so don’t be put off, try again next year – and maybe give yourself this extra bit of a head start and continue working on OOo! We’ll always and happily mentor you, if you’re enthusiastic and willing to learn – just come and ask us, you already know where!

That only leaves me to thank Google for sponsoring us; thanks to all who applied, thanks to the mentors – without you folks, all of this just won’t happen! Looking forward to a wonderful summer 2009!