This fall OSL will hold the first Annual International Open ICT (information and communications technology) Summit, a full-day event convening information technology executives from government agencies around the world. It's being held in conjunction with OSL's fourth annual Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) on October 20-23, 2008, in Portland, Oregon USA.

In a recent press release, GOSCON announced its new international advisory council. Dr. Shahani Markus Weerawarana, Chief Technology Officer, ICT Agency of Sri Lanka and founding GOSCON advisory council member stated, “The expansion of GOSCON to include an International Open ICT Summit is a timely and highly welcome step in an effort to harness practical knowledge, experiences, and best practices of eGovernment initiatives that have leveraged open ICTs.”

The GOSCON 2008 Advisory Council provides critical guidance in the formation of the Summit. The GOSCON 2008 Advisory Council includes:
Ron Fresquez, Founder and CEO, The Open Source Technology Alliance (TOSTA)
Samia Melhem, Senior Operations Officer, CITPO, GICT, World Bank
Dr. Shahani Markus Weerawarana, Chief Technology Officer, ICT Agency of Sri Lanka
Timothy Ney, Co-founder, Linux Greenhouse

Google has given a $300,000 gift to the OSUOSL to support our hosting infrastructure and the development that we provide to open source projects. This is the third large gift from Google, bringing the cumulative total of their support of the OSUOSL to $750,000.

We are very appreciative of the support that Google has shown. This gift will help us continue to provide a much needed service to the open source community, which benefits OSU, Oregon, and the rest of the world by providing tools and products that anyone can use.

The full press release can be found at http://oregonstate.edu/dept/ncs/newsarch/2008/Jul08/google.html

The OSUOSL is funded entirely by private donations by companies such as Google as well as individual donors. Please visit https://osuosl.org/contribute for information on how to contribute to the lab. You can also contact info@osuosl.org for more information.

The OSU Open Source Lab will be in the OSCON expo hall on Wednesday, July 23 and Thursday, July 24. Please stop by booth #401, near the entrance of the expo hall to meet with the students and staff from the OSL. In addition to learning about the projects we're working on, you can also take a virtual tour of our data center to check out all of the servers hosted here at the lab.

We'll also have some free swag to give away, as well as gifts in return for donations. Hope to see you there!

For more information on OSCON, see http://en.oreilly.com/oscon2008/

OSUOSL will be mentoring three students in this summer's GSoC. We are currently in the "community bonding" period, and we are eagerly awaiting May 26th when the coding will commence! Our students are all very promising and we hope for this to be a very successful summer.

This year's projects include:

FOSSology -- Kurt Maier will be working to create code dependency analysis for the FOSSology project. This will be an agent which scans through source code and autoconf files for a given package and report back the code dependancies found within.

Helix Producer -- Arup Chakraborty will be developing a G.729 codec for Helix Producer.

Unify -- Luis Francisco Araujo Camarillo will be working on Unify helping to create a framework for creating software packages for multiple Linux distributions as well as for Solaris.

We are happy to announce that the OSUOSL has been accepted to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code program. This will be the third year we are participating, and we are hoping it will be an even greater success than last year.

Are you a student who would like to get paid to work on Open Source Software? Google will pay $4500 to each applicant who successfully works with an approved organization (OSUOSL is one of them) on an Open Source project!

As of Monday, March 24th, Google is accepting student applications to participate in Summer of Code (SoC). If you are a student interested in participating, we'd love to have you work on one of our projects. You can read a list of our project ideas here -- http://dokuwiki.osuosl.org/soc/ideas We are happy to answer any questions you may have, just come by #osuosl on irc.freenode.net. If you have any ideas that aren't listed, we may be interested in those as well; feel free to drop by our IRC channel to discuss it with us.

If you'd like more information about the SoC program, check out the official FAQs: http://code.google.com/opensource/gsoc/2008/faqs.html

To apply, go to: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/