This came as a very pleasant surprise: In last night’s NZ Open Source Awards, ProjectX won the “Open Source Use in Business” category, and NZ Summer of Code took out the “Open Source Use in Education” award.

We’ll write some more soon about the advantages we’ve found to using open source, and some specific software that we can’t do without; but for the moment we’re all just rather stunned!

We’ve just been notified that ZoomIn has been nominated in the Open source in Business category and Summer of Code has been nominated in the Open source in Education. Woo Hoo ! Thanks to the NZ Open Source Association

Thanks for the recognition for ZoomIn and Summer of Code. We’re not resting with what’ve got. We’re working really hard on some major  improvements to ZoomIn and launching Summer of Code 2.0.

Kudo’s to our CHQ cousins Silverstripe in making the final selection also!

We’ve been busy working on Summer of Code 2.0. In the past couple months, we’ve been planning, recruiting, presenting, testing and marking . Phew ! Lot’s of cool stuff in the pipeline. Plenty of awesome seminars in the works. Stay tuned for more announcements.

We have a few events this week. John and Peter will at Victoria University’s ICT evening at Rutherford House on Wednesday and at the Summer of Code 2.0 Info Evening on Thursday.

Roll on Summer ! Roll on Summer of Code 2.0!

We’re starting to organise the Summer of Code seminar series, and we’re looking for speakers to talk to our students.

We’re looking for speakers and topics to help create a kick ass seminar series. We have 15 seminars that run over the summer (Nov 07 - Feb 08) and we’re looking for any topics that you can benefit the next generation of ICT graduates. All the seminars are based in Wellington, but they’ll be video’d and put up on youtube.

We’re looking at three different categories: Inspirational People, Technology ideas & concepts and new thinking.

If you think that you or your company have a speaker or topic that you think will be a hit with the Summer of Code students then let us know.

Here’s the list of speakers from last year’s programme to give you a taste of what we’re looking for:

• Michael Koziarski – Ruby on Rails Workshop
• Milton Ngan (CTO – Weta) on Distributed computing
• Rowan Simpson (Trade Me) on developing high level web systems
• Mark Robotham (CHQ) on NZ start-ups and what incubators can provide
• Nat Torkington (O’Reilly) on US start-up culture.
• Paul Gould (Trade Me) on Database systems.
• Tomek Piatek (ProjectX) on code management practices.
• Rod Drury (Aftermail) on Entrepreneurship in NZ.
• Hayden Vink (Hansel) on Interactive Design.
• Stephen Cheng (Innaworks) on Mobile phone development
• Chris Di Bona (Google) Opensource and life at Google
• Mark Robotham (Creative HQ) Entreneurship and Incubators
• John Clegg (ProjectX) on how to improve your resume.

Rock on Summer of Code 2.0Big thanks to film student Pattara Jaikasemwong for his awesome work on the video.

Know any students who are looking for a job over the summer?

The Summer of Code 2.0 is open to any Computer Science or Information Technology students, who will be completing their 2nd year this year or above and want to work for a Wellington company this summer. We have over 20 companies signed up for this years programme and they’re eagerly looking for students to help them work on research and open source projects.

We starting the recruitment process this week. If you’ve already signed up on the site you would have received an email giving you instructions on want you need to do to apply. Its not too late to join up if you haven’t done so already. You’ll need to get your resumes ready as application close on the 31st of August.

This week, I’ll be up at the universities to promote Summer of Code 2.0. I’ll be giving an outline of Summer of Code 2.0 programme and providing help on how to apply to the Summer of Code. Here are the time’s that I’ll be up at the universities.

Vic Students: 6:00pm, Wednesday 15th August - Cotton 341
Massey Students: 12pm Monday 13th of August - Room 5C19

Come along if you want to know what its all about.

We have a lot of cool stuff planned for this years Summer of Code. Don’t miss out!

Summer of Code is looking for someone to give a seminar on database basics - a “MySQL 101″, so to speak.

We’re looking to prime all of the students for this years Summer of Code and we would like to accelerate their knowledge in databases, and SQL. We want to host a workshop / tutorial to students in September. So I’m looking for a Database guru who wants to share their knowledge.

If you interested in helping please let me know.