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Last updated on Thursday, November 7, 2013
(BLOOMINGTON) - The City of Bloomington has completed its participation in the Google Summer of Code program (GSoC) as a 2013 mentoring organization.
The Google Summer of Code program matches student programmers from around the world with mentoring organizations that produce open source software. Open source software is computer software that is developed publicly so the underlying computer source code can be reviewed, changed, reused and redistributed by others.
Bloomington was the first city government to participate in Google Summer of Code program as a mentoring organization in 2012, and was honored to be selected again to participate in the 2013 program.
The City of Bloomington is a strong supporter of community source, open source, open standards and open data. The City has been at the forefront in the adoption of Open311, an open standard for managing non-emergency service requests from constituents such as filling potholes, removing graffiti, replacing street lights, etc. Our Google Summer of Code projects have helped us expand our existing suite of Open311 tools which includes smartphone apps.
The culminating event of Google Summer of Code is the Mentor Summit. Director Rick Dietz and the City's lead Developer, Cliff Ingham, were invited to Google Headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA, to meet with Google Open Source Programs Office staff and developers and mentors from open source projects around the world. At the summit, Dietz facilitated a session on the status of open source in government and strategies to promote it.
Dietz related, "Google Summer of Code 2013 was a great experience for the City. We learned a lot from GSoC 2012 and the 2012 Mentor Summit, and we put those best practices into place in 2013. We had even better results this year, in 2013, because of the lessons we learned."
Bloomington's Summer of Code students worked on four projects to create and improve GeoReporter and uReport. The uReport improvements made are in use today and updates to GeoReporter apps will be available soon.
Dietz said, "The City would like to thank the Google Open Source Team and Google Summer of Code for this rewarding partnership and their support for open source. GSoC is helping us to better serve Bloomington, and share great open source tools with the world."
For more information about Bloomington's Google Summer of Code participations and open source software development, contact Information & Technology Services Director Rick Dietz, at 349.3485 or dietzr@bloomington.in.gov. The source code for these and other Bloomington projects can be found in our GitHub repository at https://github.com/City-of-Bloomington.
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