Hi there, I'm happy to announce that five student projects were accepted to the Google Summer of Code this year. It looked dark for a while with only 2 projects assigned at first, but luckily that changed. Thank you, Google! You can find an overview of the accepted projects here: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/zope/about.html Welcome Ranjith, Dirceu, Charith! Also welcome again to Uli and Luciano! In addition, Georgy Berdyshev submitted a project to the Python Software Foundation (under the Jython sub-banner) to port Zope 3 components to Jython. This is being mentored by Frank Wierzbicki, a lead developer of Jython. We should do our best to back up this very important project: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/psf/appinfo.html?csaid=59C7870763174C10 We also cannot forget our sister organization, the Plone Foundation, which also had 5 projects accepted. Some of the work done in these projects will doubtlessly feed back into Zope as well: http://code.google.com/soc/2008/plone/about.html In particular, the component registry introspector project by Martin Lundwall has already seen coordination with Uli's introspector project, so we're off to a good start in working together. Unfortunately we had a limited amount of slots and more worthwhile proposals than we should allocate, so there were worthwhile projects we had to reject. I'd like to thank the students who submitted them for their work. I hope that this won't discourage you from Zope. Hopefully we will see you around, and please do try again next year if you'd like! Thanks also to the mentors for all your feedback so far. Now the *real* work will start. I'd like to thank Aroldo especially for his tireless help in preparing us all for the Summer of Code. He worked hard to get all the administrative details worked out. Soon I will write a followup message to the gsoc@zope.org list (mentors, students, you are all subscribed, aren't you?) with some guidelines for how we'd like to conduct our projects this year. Regards, Martijn, mentor coordinator