City of Bloomington completes Google’s “Summer of Code” program

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nov. 4, 2012

For more information, please contact:
Rick Dietz, Director, City of Bloomington Department of Information and Technology Services, 349.3485, [mailto:dietzr@bloomington.in.gov]


City of Bloomington completes Google's "Summer of Code" program

Bloomington, Ind. - The City of Bloomington is happy to announce its completion of the 2012 Google Summer of Code program. The City was selected to receive student programming assistance and serve as a mentoring organization in March. The City is the first government to serve in the program in this capacity.

"This has been an inspiring experience for us, and we hope it also motivates others," said Information and Technology Services Director Rick Dietz. "We hope to have peers next year as more governments rightly embrace the economy of open source software, and we look forward to additional ways to apply all that we have learned this summer. Many thanks to the Google Open Source Programs Office and to Google Summer of Code for this rewarding partnership."

The City is a strong supporter of community source, open source, open standards and open data, and is a leader in the adoption of Open311, an open standard for managing non-emergency service requests such as filling potholes, removing graffiti and replacing street lights. The Summer of Code projects have helped the City expand its existing suite of Open311 tools, which include a lightweight CRM with Open311 API and an iOS Open311 client. The City's GeoReporter for Android app was developed by Fransiska Putri Wina Hadiwidjana and will be available later this year, and the GeoReporter for the Kuali Mobility platform was completed by Aashish Mittal. These City projects and others can be found in the Code for America Commons at [http://commons.codeforamerica.org|http://commons.codeforamerica.org].

The culminating Summer of Code event was the mentor summit, during which Dietz and City of Bloomington Application Developer Cliff Ingham were invited to Google's headquarters in Sunnyvale, Calif., to meet with Google Open Source Programs Office staff and developers from open source projects across the world. At the summit Dietz facilitated two sessions on the status and future of open source software in government.

This is the eighth year that Google has operated the Summer of Code program. Google matches student interns 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.

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More about the projects and interns:

GeoReporter for Android
Prior to joining Google Summer of Code, the City had completed an iOS Open311 client, but desired an Android version as well. Fransiska Putri Wina Hadiwidjana approached Bloomington through the Open311.org email list. Her interest in Open311 led her to our Open311 Toolkit, and she asked if the City would consider participating in Google Summer of Code.

"We owe Fransiska not only for her work product this summer, but for making our whole experience with Google Summer of Code possible," Dietz said. "It would probably not have occurred to us to make this leap without her nudging. She introduced changes that streamlined our user experience, and her source code will be the foundation for a full release in Google Play later this year."

GeoReporter for Kuali Mobility for the Enterprise
Kuali Mobility for the Enterprise (KME) is a framework for building mobile tools. KME is a JQuery Mobile and PhoneGap platform using HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript with native wrappers to provide features that are not yet available via web programming. The City and KME partnered this year to mentor a Google Summer of Code project to build an Open311 KME tool. The City is considering KME for its mobile web platform and needs Open311 capability to make this move.

Aashish Mittal has worked previously with the Sakai Open Source Project, a sister project to Kuali. He started learning the KME framework and researching the Open311 specification and from there helped define a better approach to web service usage in KME itself., Aashish built the Open311 tool and completed the web service integration with the City's Open311 API. The outcome and final product will now be integrated back into the KME SVN trunk and become available worldwide for anyone using the KME framework.