WebRTC continues to gather momentum around the world. Over the next week, Paris will host a TADHack event on WebRTC (12-13 December) followed by Europe's most well known meeting of the WebRTC community, the annual WebRTC Conference and Expo, 16-18 December. 2015 has been a busy year for WebRTC developers, in the browser, on the server-side and even in documentation, with the online publication of The RTC Quick Start Guide. These efforts have all come together to create a stable foundation for many implementations in 2016. Demo The JSCommunicator demo video shows just how convenient WebRTC can be, looking at the first customer-facing WebRTC deployment on Wall Street, a project I put together back in 2014: This solution was implemented entirely with free, open source software integrated with a traditional corporate PBX. The project involved significant innovation to bring together a new technology like WebRTC with a very established corporate telephony infrastructure. For example, the solution makes use of the reSIProcate Python scripting to add the Avaya UUI headers to the SIP signaling, so it can integrate seamlessly with all existing Avaya customizations and desktop CRM software. Is this something you can imagine on your organization's web site or as part of your web-based product or service? DruCall module for Drupal - WebRTC without coding If you run a Drupal CMS or if you would like to, the DruCall module provides a very quick way to get started with WebRTC. On a Debian or Ubuntu server, you can automatically deploy the entire Drupal stack, Apache, MySQL and all module dependencies with $ sudo apt-get install -t jessie-backports drupal7-mod-drucall JSCommunicator, the generic SIP phone for web pages If you don't want to do any JavaScript development, JSCommunicator may be the way to go. JSCommunicator is a completely generic solution that can be completely re-branded just by tweaking the HTML and CSS. All phone features can be enabled and disabled using the configuration file. WebRTC plugins for CRM solutions As part of Google Summer of Code 2014, Juliana Louback created a WebRTC plugin for the xTuple enterprise CRM and ERP suite. The source code of the DruCall and xTuple plugins provide an excellent point of reference for developing similar plugins for other web applications. Both of them are based on JSCommunicator which is designed to embed easily into any existing HTML page or templating system. Get involved To find out more and discuss RTC using free software and open standards, please join us on the Free-RTC mailing list.

Announced 7 November 2015 on the debian-devel-announce mailing list. The Debian Project now has an XMPP service available to all Debian Developers. Your Debian.org email identity can be used as your XMPP address. The SIP service has also been upgraded and now supports presence. SIP and XMPP presence, rosters and messaging are not currently integrated. The Lumicall app has been improved to enable rapid setup for Debian.org SIP users. This announcement concludes the maintenance window on the RTC services. All services are now running on jessie (using packages from jessie-backports). XMPP and SIP enable a whole new world of real-time multimedia communications possibilities: video/webcam, VoIP, chat messaging, desktop sharing and distributed, federated communication are the most common use cases. Details about how to get started and get support are explained in the User Guide in the Debian wiki. As it is a wiki, you are completely welcome to help it evolve. Several of the people involved in the RTC team were also at the Cambridge mini-DebConf (7-8 November). The password for all these real time communication services can be set via the LDAP control panel. Please note that this password needs to be different to any of your other existing debian.org passwords. Please use a strong password and please keep it secure. Some of the infrastructure, like the TURN server, is shared by clients of both SIP and XMPP. Please configure your XMPP and SIP clients to use the TURN server for audio or video streaming to work most reliably through NAT. A key feature of both our XMPP and SIP services is that they support federated inter-connectivity with other domains. Please try it. The FedRTC service for Fedora developers is one example of another SIP service that supports federation. For details of how it works and how we establish trust between domains, please see the RTC Quick Start Guide. Please reach out to other communities you are involved with and help them consider enabling SIP and XMPP federation of their own communities/domains: as Metcalfe's law suggests, each extra person or community who embraces open standards like SIP and XMPP has far more than just an incremental impact on the value of these standards and makes them more pervasive. If you are keen to support and collaborate on the wider use of Free RTC technology, please consider joining the Free RTC mailing list sponsored by FSF Europe. There will also be a dedicated debian-rtc list for discussion of these technologies within Debian and derivatives. This service has been made possible by the efforts of the DSA team in the original SIP+WebRTC project and the more recent jessie upgrades and XMPP project. Real-time communications systems have specific expectations for network latency, connectivity, authentication schemes and various other things. Therefore, it is a great endorsement of the caliber of the team and the quality of the systems they have in place that they have been able to host this largely within their existing framework for Debian services. Feedback from the DSA team has also been helpful in improving the upstream software and packaging to make them convenient for system administrators everywhere. Special thanks to Peter Palfrader and Luca Filipozzi from the DSA team, Matthew Wild from the Prosody XMPP server project, Scott Godin from the reSIProcate project, Juliana Louback for her contributions to JSCommunicator during GSoC 2014, Iain Learmonth for helping get the RTC team up and running, Enrico Tassi, Sergei Golovan and Victor Seva for the Prosody and prosody-modules packaging and also the Debian backports team, especially Alexander Wirt, helping us ensure that rapidly evolving packages like those used in RTC are available on a stable Debian system.

A few problems were observed during the demo of RTC services at the Cambridge mini-DebConf yesterday. As it turns out, many of them are already documented and solutions are available for some of them. Multiple concurrent SIP registrations I had made some test calls on Friday using rtc.debian.org and I still had the site open in another tab in another browser window. When people tried to call me during the demo, both tabs were actually ringing but only one was visible. When a SIP client registers, the SIP registration server sends it a list of all other concurrent registrations in the response message. We simply need to extend JSCommunicator to inspect the response message and give some visual feedback about other concurrent registrations. Issue #69. SIP also provides a mechanism to clear concurrent registrations and that could be made available with a button or configuration option too (Issue #9). Callee hears ringing before connectivity checks completed The second issue during the WebRTC demo was that the callee (myself) was alerted about the call before the ICE checks had been performed. The optimal procedure to provide a slick user experience is to run the connectivity checks before alerting the callee. If the connectivity checks fail, the callee should never be alerted with a ringing sound and would never know somebody had tried to call. The caller would be told that the call was unable to be attempted and encouraged to consider trying again on another wifi network. RFC 5245 recommends that connectivity checks should be done first but it is not mandatory. One reason this is problematic with WebRTC is the need to display the pop-up asking the user for permission to share their microphone and webcam: the popup must appear before connectivity checks can commence. This has been discussed in the JsSIP issue tracker. Non-WebRTC softphones, such as Lumicall, do the connectivity checks before alerting the callee. Dealing with UDP blocking It appears the corporate wifi network in the venue was blocking the UDP packets so the connectivity checks could never complete, not even using a TURN server to relay the packets. People trying to use the service on home wifi networks, in small offices and mobile tethering should not have this problem as these services generally permit UDP by default. Some corporate networks, student accommodation and wifi networks in some larger hotels have blocked UDP and in these cases, additional effort must be made to get through the firewall. The TURN server we are running for rtc.debian.org also supports a TLS transport but it simply isn't configured yet. At the time we originally launched the WebRTC service in 2013, the browsers didn't support TURN over TLS at all but now they do. This is probably the biggest problem encountered during the demo but it does not require any code change to resolve this, just configuration, so a solution is well within reach. During the demo, we worked around the issue by turning off the wifi on my laptop and using tethering with a 4G mobile network. All the calls made successfully during the demo used the tethering solution. Add a connectivity check timeout The ICE connectivity checks appeared to keep running for a long time. Usually, if UDP is not blocked, the ICE checks would complete in less than two seconds. Therefore, the JavaScript needs to set a timeout between two and five seconds when it starts the checks and give the user a helpful warning about their network problems if the timeout is exceeded. Issue #73 in JSCommunicator. While these lengthy connectivity checks appear disappointing, it is worth remembering that this is an improvement over the first generation of softphones: none of them made these checks at all, they would simply tell the user the call had been answered but audio and video would only be working in one direction or not at all. Microphone issues One of the users calling into the demo, Juliana, was visible on the screen but we couldn't hear her. This was a local audio hardware issue with her laptop or headset. It would be useful if the JavaScript could provide visual feedback when it detects a voice (issue #74) and even better, integrating with the sound settings so that the user can see if the microphone is muted or the gain is very low (issue #75). Thanks to participants in the demo I'd like to thank all the participants in the demo, including Juliana Louback who called us from New York, Laura Arjona who called us from Madrid, Daniel Silverstone who called from about three meters away in the front row and Iain Learmonth who helped co-ordinate the test calls over IRC. Thanks are also due to Steve McIntyre, the local Debian community, ARM and the other sponsors for making another mini-DebConf in the UK this year.

I've mentored a number of students in 2013, 2014 and 2015 for Debian and Ganglia and most of the companies I've worked with have run internships and graduate programs from time to time. GSoC 2015 has just finished and with all the excitement, many students are already asking what they can do to prepare and be selected for Outreachy or GSoC in 2016. My own observation is that the more time the organization has to get to know the student, the more confident they can be selecting that student. Furthermore, the more time that the student has spent getting to know the free software community, the more easily they can complete GSoC. Here I present a list of things that students can do to maximize their chance of selection and career opportunities at the same time. These tips are useful for people applying for GSoC itself and related programs such as GNOME's Outreachy or graduate placements in companies. Disclaimers There is no guarantee that Google will run the program again in 2016 or any future year until the Google announcement. There is no guarantee that any organization or mentor (including myself) will be involved until the official list of organizations is published by Google. Do not follow the advice of web sites that invite you to send pizza or anything else of value to prospective mentors. Following the steps in this page doesn't guarantee selection. That said, people who do follow these steps are much more likely to be considered and interviewed than somebody who hasn't done any of the things in this list. Understand what free software really is You may hear terms like free software and open source software used interchangeably. They don't mean exactly the same thing and many people use the term free software for the wrong things. Not all projects declaring themselves to be "free" or "open source" meet the definition of free software. Those that don't, usually as a result of deficiencies in their licenses, are fundamentally incompatible with the majority of software that does use genuinely free licenses. Google Summer of Code is about both writing and publishing your code and it is also about community. It is fundamental that you know the basics of licensing and how to choose a free license that empowers the community to collaborate on your code well after GSoC has finished. Please review the definition of free software early on and come back and review it from time to time. The The GNU Project / Free Software Foundation have excellent resources to help you understand what a free software license is and how it works to maximize community collaboration. Don't look for shortcuts There is no shortcut to GSoC selection and there is no shortcut to GSoC completion. The student stipend (USD $5,500 in 2014) is not paid to students unless they complete a minimum amount of valid code. This means that even if a student did find some shortcut to selection, it is unlikely they would be paid without completing meaningful work. If you are the right candidate for GSoC, you will not need a shortcut anyway. Are you the sort of person who can't leave a coding problem until you really feel it is fixed, even if you keep going all night? Have you ever woken up in the night with a dream about writing code still in your head? Do you become irritated by tedious or repetitive tasks and often think of ways to write code to eliminate such tasks? Does your family get cross with you because you take your laptop to Christmas dinner or some other significant occasion and start coding? If some of these statements summarize the way you think or feel you are probably a natural fit for GSoC. An opportunity money can't buy The GSoC stipend will not make you rich. It is intended to make sure you have enough money to survive through the summer and focus on your project. Professional developers make this much money in a week in leading business centers like New York, London and Singapore. When you get to that stage in 3-5 years, you will not even be thinking about exactly how much you made during internships. GSoC gives you an edge over other internships because it involves publicly promoting your work. Many companies still try to hide the potential of their best recruits for fear they will be poached or that they will be able to demand higher salaries. Everything you complete in GSoC is intended to be published and you get full credit for it. Imagine a young musician getting the opportunity to perform on the main stage at a rock festival. This is how the free software community works. It is a meritocracy and there is nobody to hold you back. Having a portfolio of free software that you have created or collaborated on and a wide network of professional contacts that you develop before, during and after GSoC will continue to pay you back for years to come. While other graduates are being screened through group interviews and testing days run by employers, people with a track record in a free software project often find they go straight to the final interview round. Register your domain name and make a permanent email address Free software is all about community and collaboration. Register your own domain name as this will become a focal point for your work and for people to get to know you as you become part of the community. This is sound advice for anybody working in IT, not just programmers. It gives the impression that you are confident and have a long term interest in a technology career. Choosing the provider: as a minimum, you want a provider that offers DNS management, static web site hosting, email forwarding and XMPP services all linked to your domain. You do not need to choose the provider that is linked to your internet connection at home and that is often not the best choice anyway. The XMPP foundation maintains a list of providers known to support XMPP. Create an email address within your domain name. The most basic domain hosting providers will let you forward the email address to a webmail or university email account of your choice. Configure your webmail to send replies using your personalized email address in the From header. Update your ~/.gitconfig file to use your personalized email address in your Git commits. Create a web site and blog Start writing a blog. Host it using your domain name. Some people blog every day, other people just blog once every two or three months. Create links from your web site to your other profiles, such as a Github profile page. This helps reinforce the pages/profiles that are genuinely related to you and avoid confusion with the pages of other developers. Many mentors are keen to see their students writing a weekly report on a blog during GSoC so starting a blog now gives you a head start. Mentors look at blogs during the selection process to try and gain insight into which topics a student is most suitable for. Create a profile on Github Github is one of the most widely used software development web sites. Github makes it quick and easy for you to publish your work and collaborate on the work of other people. Create an account today and get in the habbit of forking other projects, improving them, committing your changes and pushing the work back into your Github account. Github will quickly build a profile of your commits and this allows mentors to see and understand your interests and your strengths. In your Github profile, add a link to your web site/blog and make sure the email address you are using for Git commits (in the ~/.gitconfig file) is based on your personal domain. Start using PGP Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) is the industry standard in protecting your identity online. All serious free software projects use PGP to sign tags in Git, to sign official emails and to sign official release files. The most common way to start using PGP is with the GnuPG (GNU Privacy Guard) utility. It is installed by the package manager on most Linux systems. When you create your own PGP key, use the email address involving your domain name. This is the most permanent and stable solution. Print your key fingerprint using the gpg-key2ps command, it is in the signing-party package on most Linux systems. Keep copies of the fingerprint slips with you. This is what my own PGP fingerprint slip looks like. You can also print the key fingerprint on a business card for a more professional look. Using PGP, it is recommend that you sign any important messages you send but you do not have to encrypt the messages you send, especially if some of the people you send messages to (like family and friends) do not yet have the PGP software to decrypt them. If using the Thunderbird (Icedove) email client from Mozilla, you can easily send signed messages and validate the messages you receive using the Enigmail plugin. Get your PGP key signed Once you have a PGP key, you will need to find other developers to sign it. For people I mentor personally in GSoC, I'm keen to see that you try and find another Debian Developer in your area to sign your key as early as possible. Free software events Try and find all the free software events in your area in the months between now and the end of the next Google Summer of Code season. Aim to attend at least two of them before GSoC. Look closely at the schedules and find out about the individual speakers, the companies and the free software projects that are participating. For events that span more than one day, find out about the dinners, pub nights and other social parts of the event. Try and identify people who will attend the event who have been GSoC mentors or who intend to be. Contact them before the event, if you are keen to work on something in their domain they may be able to make time to discuss it with you in person. Take your PGP fingerprint slips. Even if you don't participate in a formal key-signing party at the event, you will still find some developers to sign your PGP key individually. You must take a photo ID document (such as your passport) for the other developer to check the name on your fingerprint but you do not give them a copy of the ID document. Events come in all shapes and sizes. FOSDEM is an example of one of the bigger events in Europe, linux.conf.au is a similarly large event in Australia. There are many, many more local events such as the Debian UK mini-DebConf in Cambridge, November 2015. Many events are either free or free for students but please check carefully if there is a requirement to register before attending. On your blog, discuss which events you are attending and which sessions interest you. Write a blog during or after the event too, including photos. Quantcast generously hosted the Ganglia community meeting in San Francisco, October 2013. We had a wild time in their offices with mini-scooters, burgers, beers and the Ganglia book. That's me on the pink mini-scooter and Bernard Li, one of the other Ganglia GSoC 2014 admins is on the right. Install Linux GSoC is fundamentally about free software. Linux is to free software what a tree is to the forest. Using Linux every day on your personal computer dramatically increases your ability to interact with the free software community and increases the number of potential GSoC projects that you can participate in. This is not to say that people using Mac OS or Windows are unwelcome. I have worked with some great developers who were not Linux users. Linux gives you an edge though and the best time to gain that edge is now, while you are a student and well before you apply for GSoC. If you must run Windows for some applications used in your course, it will run just fine in a virtual machine using Virtual Box, a free software solution for desktop virtualization. Use Linux as the primary operating system. Here are links to download ISO DVD (and CD) images for some of the main Linux distributions:

• Debian
• Fedora
• Ubuntu

If you are nervous about getting started with Linux, install it on a spare PC or in a virtual machine before you install it on your main PC or laptop. Linux is much less demanding on the hardware than Windows so you can easily run it on a machine that is 5-10 years old. Having just 4GB of RAM and 20GB of hard disk is usually more than enough for a basic graphical desktop environment although having better hardware makes it faster. Your experiences installing and running Linux, especially if it requires some special effort to make it work with some of your hardware, make interesting topics for your blog. Decide which technologies you know best Personally, I have mentored students working with C, C++, Java, Python and JavaScript/HTML5. In a GSoC program, you will typically do most of your work in just one of these languages. From the outset, decide which language you will focus on and do everything you can to improve your competence with that language. For example, if you have already used Java in most of your course, plan on using Java in GSoC and make sure you read Effective Java (2nd Edition) by Joshua Bloch. Decide which themes appeal to you Find a topic that has long-term appeal for you. Maybe the topic relates to your course or maybe you already know what type of company you would like to work in. Here is a list of some topics and some of the relevant software projects:

• System administration, servers and networking: consider projects involving monitoring, automation, packaging. Ganglia is a great community to get involved with and you will encounter the Ganglia software in many large companies and academic/research networks. Contributing to a Linux distribution like Debian or Fedora packaging is another great way to get into system administration.
• Desktop and user interface: consider projects involving window managers and desktop tools or adding to the user interface of just about any other software.
• Big data and data science: this can apply to just about any other theme. For example, data science techniques are frequently used now to improve system administration.
• Business and accounting: consider accounting, CRM and ERP software.
• Finance and trading: consider projects like R, market data software like OpenMAMA and connectivity software (Apache Camel)
• Real-time communication (RTC), VoIP, webcam and chat: look at the JSCommunicator or the Jitsi project
• Web (JavaScript, HTML5): look at the JSCommunicator

Before the GSoC application process begins, you should aim to learn as much as possible about the theme you prefer and also gain practical experience using the software relating to that theme. For example, if you are attracted to the business and accounting theme, install the PostBooks suite and get to know it. Maybe you know somebody who runs a small business: help them to upgrade to PostBooks and use it to prepare some reports. Make something Make some small project, less than two week's work, to demonstrate your skills. It is important to make something that somebody will use for a practical purpose, this will help you gain experience communicating with other users through Github. For an example, see the servlet Juliana Louback created for fixing phone numbers in December 2013. It has since been used as part of the Lumicall web site and Juliana was selected for a GSoC 2014 project with Debian. There is no better way to demonstrate to a prospective mentor that you are ready for GSoC than by completing and publishing some small project like this yourself. If you don't have any immediate project ideas, many developers will also be able to give you tips on small projects like this that you can attempt, just come and ask us on one of the mailing lists. Ideally, the project will be something that you would use anyway even if you do not end up participating in GSoC. Such projects are the most motivating and rewarding and usually end up becoming an example of your best work. To continue the example of somebody with a preference for business and accounting software, a small project you might create is a plugin or extension for PostBooks. Getting to know prospective mentors Many web sites provide useful information about the developers who contribute to free software projects. Some of these developers may be willing to be a GSoC mentor. For example, look through some of the following:

• Planet / Blog aggregation sites: these sites all have links to the blogs of many developers. They are useful sources of information about events and also finding out who works on what.
  • planet.debian.org
  • planet.fedoraproject.org
  • planet.ubuntu.com
  • planet.drupal.org
  • planet.postgresql.org
• Developer profile pages. Many projects publish a page about each developer and the packages, modules or other components he/she is responsible for. Look through these lists for areas of mutual interest.
  • my package list in Debian
  • my package list in Fedora
• Developer github profiles. Github makes it easy to see what projects a developer has contributed to. To see many of my own projects, browse through the history at my own Github profile

Getting on the mentor's shortlist Once you have identified projects that are interesting to you and developers who work on those projects, it is important to get yourself on the developer's shortlist. Basically, the shortlist is a list of all students who the developer believes can complete the project. If I feel that a student is unlikely to complete a project or if I don't have enough information to judge a student's probability of success, that student will not be on my shortlist. If I don't have any student on my shortlist, then a project will not go ahead at all. If there are multiple students on the shortlist, then I will be looking more closely at each of them to try and work out who is the best match. One way to get a developer's attention is to look at bug reports they have created. Github makes it easy to see complaints or bug reports they have made about their own projects or other projects they depend on. Another way to do this is to search through their code for strings like FIXME and TODO. Projects with standalone bug trackers like the Debian bug tracker also provide an easy way to search for bug reports that a specific person has created or commented on. Once you find some relevant bug reports, email the developer. Ask if anybody else is working on those issues. Try and start with an issue that is particularly easy and where the solution is interesting for you. This will help you learn to compile and test the program before you try to fix any more complicated bugs. It may even be something you can work on as part of your academic program. Find successful projects from the previous year Contact organizations and ask them which GSoC projects were most successful. In many organizations, you can find the past students' project plans and their final reports published on the web. Read through the plans submitted by the students who were chosen. Then read through the final reports by the same students and see how they compare to the original plans. Start building your project proposal now Don't wait for the application period to begin. Start writing a project proposal now. When writing a proposal, it is important to include several things:

• Think big: what is the goal at the end of the project? Does your work help the greater good in some way, such as increasing the market share of Linux on the desktop?
• Details: what are specific challenges? What tools will you use?
• Time management: what will you do each week? Are there weeks where you will not work on GSoC due to vacation or other events? These things are permitted but they must be in your plan if you know them in advance. If an accident or death in the family cut a week out of your GSoC project, which work would you skip and would your project still be useful without that? Having two weeks of flexible time in your plan makes it more resilient against interruptions.
• Communication: are you on mailing lists, IRC and XMPP chat? Will you make a weekly report on your blog?
• Users: who will benefit from your work?
• Testing: who will test and validate your work throughout the project? Ideally, this should involve more than just the mentor.

If your project plan is good enough, could you put it on Kickstarter or another crowdfunding site? This is a good test of whether or not a project is going to be supported by a GSoC mentor. Learn about packaging and distributing software Packaging is a vital part of the free software lifecycle. It is very easy to upload a project to Github but it takes more effort to have it become an official package in systems like Debian, Fedora and Ubuntu. Packaging and the communities around Linux distributions help you reach out to users of your software and get valuable feedback and new contributors. This boosts the impact of your work. To start with, you may want to help the maintainer of an existing package. Debian packaging teams are existing communities that work in a team and welcome new contributors. The Debian Mentors initiative is another great starting place. In the Fedora world, the place to start may be in one of the Special Interest Groups (SIGs). Think from the mentor's perspective After the application deadline, mentors have just 2 or 3 weeks to choose the students. This is actually not a lot of time to be certain if a particular student is capable of completing a project. If the student has a published history of free software activity, the mentor feels a lot more confident about choosing the student. Some mentors have more than one good student while other mentors receive no applications from capable students. In this situation, it is very common for mentors to send each other details of students who may be suitable. Once again, if a student has a good Github profile and a blog, it is much easier for mentors to try and match that student with another project. Conclusion Getting into the world of software engineering is much like joining any other profession or even joining a new hobby or sporting activity. If you run, you probably have various types of shoe and a running watch and you may even spend a couple of nights at the track each week. If you enjoy playing a musical instrument, you probably have a collection of sheet music, accessories for your instrument and you may even aspire to build a recording studio in your garage (or you probably know somebody else who already did that). The things listed on this page will not just help you walk the walk and talk the talk of a software developer, they will put you on a track to being one of the leaders. If you look over the profiles of other software developers on the Internet, you will find they are doing most of the things on this page already. Even if you are not selected for GSoC at all or decide not to apply, working through the steps on this page will help you clarify your own ideas about your career and help you make new friends in the software engineering community.

I've offered to help mentor a Google Summer of Code student to work on DruCall. Here is a link to the project details. The original DruCall was based on SIPml5 and released in 2013 as a proof-of-concept. It was later adapted to use JSCommunicator as the webphone implementation. JSCommunicator itself was updated by another GSoC student, Juliana Louback, in 2014. It would be great to take DruCall further in 2015, here are some of the possibilities that are achievable in GSoC:

• Updating it for Drupal 8
• Support for logged-in users (currently it just makes anonymous calls, like a phone box)
• Support for relaying shopping cart or other session cookie details to the call center operative who accepts the call

Help needed: could you be a co-mentor? My background is in real-time and server-side infrastructure and I'm providing all the WebRTC SIP infrastructure that the student may need. However, for the project to have the most impact, it would also be helpful to have some input from a second mentor who knows about UI design, the Drupal way of doing things and maybe some Drupal 8 experience. Please contact me ASAP if you would be keen to participate either as a mentor or as a student. The deadline for student applications is just hours away but there is still more time for potential co-mentors to join in. WebRTC at mini-DebConf Lyon in April The next mini-DebConf takes place in Lyon, France on April 11 and 12. On the Saturday morning, there will be a brief WebRTC demo and there will be other opportunities to demo or test it and ask questions throughout the day. If you are interested in trying to get WebRTC into your web site, with or without Drupal, please see the RTC Quick Start guide.

I recently updated the PostBooks packages in Debian and Ubuntu to version 4.7. This is the version that was released in Ubuntu 14.10 (Utopic Unicorn) and is part of the upcoming Debian 8 (jessie) release. Better prospects for Fedora and RHEL/CentOS/EPEL packages As well as getting the packages ready, I've been in contact with xTuple helping them generalize their build system to make packaging easier. This has eliminated the need to patch the makefiles during the build. As well as making it easier to support the Debian/Ubuntu packages, this should make it far easier for somebody to create a spec file for RPM packaging too. Debian wins a prize While visiting xTupleCon 2014 in Norfolk, I was delighted to receive the Community Member of the Year award which I happily accepted not just for my own efforts but for the Debian Project as a whole. Steve Hackbarth, Director of Product Development at xTuple, myself and the impressive Community Member of the Year trophy This is a great example of the productive relationships that exist between Debian, upstream developers and the wider free software community and it is great to be part of a team that can synthesize the work from so many other developers into ready-to-run solutions on a 100% free software platform. Receiving this award really made me think about all the effort that has gone into making it possible to apt-get install postbooks and all the people who have collectively done far more work than myself to make this possible:

• The Debian PostgreSQL packaging team making the PostgreSQL server, client libraries and related packages available to install and upgrade easily on Debian and Ubuntu.
• The Debian Qt/KDE packaging team providing the Qt libraries.
• Andrew Shadura originally started the Postbooks packaging and preparing patches for a clean build on Debian.
• Juliana Louback who created the JSCommunicator / WebRTC extension for xTuple's new web interface while working in Google Summer of Code.
• xTuple themselves, who have an ongoing and enthusiastic commitment to free software and are actively developing their new web platform on Github.

Here is a screenshot of the xTuple web / JSCommunicator integration, it was one of the highlights of xTupleCon: and gives a preview of the wide range of commercial opportunities that WebRTC is creating for software vendors to displace traditional telecommunications providers. xTupleCon also gave me a great opportunity to see new features (like the xTuple / Drupal web shop integration) and hear about the success of consultants and their clients deploying xTuple/PostBooks in various scenarios. The product is extremely strong in meeting the needs of manufacturing and distribution and has gained a lot of traction in these industries in the US. Many of these features are equally applicable in other markets with a strong manufacturing industry such as Germany or the UK. However, it is also flexible enough to simply disable many of the specialized features and use it as a general purpose accounting solution for consulting and services businesses. This makes it a good option for many IT freelancers and support providers looking for a way to keep their business accounts in a genuinely open source solution with a strong SQL backend and a native Linux desktop interface.

In 2013, Debian participated in both rounds of the GNOME Outreach Program for Women (OPW). The first round was run in conjunction with GSoC and the second round was a standalone program. The publicity around these programs and the strength of the Google and Debian brands attracted a range of female candidates, many of whom were shortlisted by mentors after passing their coding tests and satisfying us that they had the capability to complete a project successfully. As there are only a limited number of places for GSoC and limited funding for OPW, only a subset of these capable candidates were actually selected. The second round of OPW, for example, was only able to select two women. Google to the rescue Many of the women applying for the second round of OPW in 2013 were also students eligible for GSoC 2014. Debian was lucky to have over twenty places funded for GSoC 2014 and those women who had started preparing project plans for OPW and getting to know the Debian community were in a strong position to be considered for GSoC. Chandrika Parimoo, who applied to Debian for the first round of OPW in 2013, was selected by the Ganglia project for one of five GSoC slots. Chandrika made contributions to PyNag and the ganglia-nagios-bridge. Juliana Louback, who applied to Debian during the second round of OPW in 2013, was selected for one of Debian's GSoC 2014 slots working on the Debian WebRTC portal. The portal is built using JSCommunicator, a generic HTML5 softphone designed to be integrated in other web sites, portal frameworks and CMS systems. Juliana has been particularly enthusiastic with her work and after completing the core requirements of her project, I suggested she explore just what is involved in embedding JSCommunicator into another open source application. By co-incidence, the xTuple development team had decided to dedicate the month of August to open source engagement, running a program called haxTuple. Juliana had originally applied to OPW with an interest in financial software and so this appeared to be a great opportunity for her to broaden her experience and engagement with the open source community. Despite having no prior experience with ERP/CRM software, Juliana set about developing a plugin/extension for the new xTuple web frontend. She has published the extension in Github and written a detailed blog about her experience with the xTuple extension API. Participation in DebConf14 Juliana attended DebConf14 in Portland and gave a presentation of her work on the Debian RTC portal. Many more people were able to try the portal for the first time thanks to her participation in DebConf. The video of the GSoC students at DebConf14 is available here. Continuing with open source beyond GSoC Although GSoC finished in August, xTuple invited Juliana and I to attend their annual xTupleCon in Norfolk, Virginia. Google went the extra mile and helped Juliana to get there and she gave a live demonstration of the xTuple extension she had created. This effort has simultaneously raised the profile of Debian, open source and open standards (SIP and WebRTC) in front of a wider audience of professional developers and business users. It started with OPW The key point to emphasize is that Juliana's work in GSoC was actually made possible by Debian's decision to participate in and promote Outreach Program for Women in 2013. I've previously attended DebConf myself to help more developers become familiar with free and open RTC technology. I wasn't able to get there this year but thanks to the way GSoC and OPW are expanding our community, Juliana was there to help out.