Many Haiku fans have been eagerly waiting for the next BeGeistert, and the official word is out now: BeGeistert 018 -- Phoenix is coming back to Düsseldorf, where it will be held on January 12 and 13, 2008. But the good news does not end here: as a prelude to BeGeistert, a coding asylum event with the expected presence of many Haiku core developers has been organized on the same week and at the sample place.

In this, it's 18th edition, BeGeistert is going back to the recently renovated Youth Hostel Düsseldorf, the same place that has hosted this community event so many times in the past. The program for BeGeistert is known to develop in the run up to the event itself, but you can expect a wide array of presentations and workshops, most of which will be directly or indirectly related to Haiku. This will most likely include a Haiku development progress report from one or more of the core Haiku developers, as well as an update on the status of Haiku Inc., the non-profit supporting the Haiku project. There are also plans to present and demo, for the first time in public, a Haiku-based commercial application that has been quietly in development for the last two years. The Youth Hostel Düsseldorf where BeGeistert 018 will take place is located in the Oberkassel district, opposite to the historic city center and directly on the bank of the Rhine. This gives BeGeistert participants also a chance to enjoy numerous interesting sightseeing spots conveniently located at walking distance.

Several Haiku developers plan to kick off the coding session early: they’ll start already on the 8th. This meeting has been spontaneously organized to give Haiku development a last minute kick before the demonstrations during BeGeistert. These well known Haiku developers will participate in the coding session:

• Ithamar R. Adema
• Stephan Aßmus
• Axel Dörfler
• Jérôme Duval
• Michael Lotz
• Marcus Overhagen
• François Revol
• Oliver Tappe

If you are a Haiku developer and would like to attend this coding event, please contact Stephan Aßmus, geek liaison officer of the BeGeistert Orga-Team.

BeGeistert is an event that has been providing the BeOS user and developer communities a venue to gather for almost ten years. First celebrated in Düsseldorf, on December 1998, BeGeistert is organized by Charlie Clark and the rest of the BeGeistert Orga-Team. This coming chapter of the event is shaping up to become a BeGeistert on steroids, and an action packed week for Haiku too, so don't miss it!

BeGeistert 018 -- Phoenix facts at a glance

• Place: Youth Hostel Düsseldorf (location info)
• Dates: January 12 and 13, 2008
• Registration: www.begeistert.org/register
• Car pooling: www.begeistert.org/lift

Coding Asylum

• Place: Youth Hostel Düsseldorf
• Dates: January 8 through 11, 2008
• If you would like to participate: Contact Stephan Aßmus

Haiku Inc. recently received from Google a check for $4,000 for its participation in the last Google Summer of Code 2007 program. This is ten percent of the total $40,000 that Google disbursed to sponsor the eight Haiku related projects alloted for GSoC 2007. We want to thank Google for giving us the opportunity to participate in the program for the first time this year, and hope they will consider us again for next year.

The Google Summer of Code is a program designed to sponsor students to work in open source projects during the three summer months. Open source software projects like Haiku apply to become mentoring organizations, and put forward projects that students from all over the world can apply for. The mentoring organizations provide mentors to guide the students throughout the program and to assist them in the successful completion of their project. For each successfully completed project, Google pays $4,500 to the student and $500 to the mentoring organization.

GSoC Mentor Summit photo. Can you find Stephan and Oliver?Haiku's application to the GSoC was accepted for the first time in 2007, and Google assigned us eight student slots, for Haiku projects covering areas as varied as the network stack, USB, Firewire, a package installer, a new scheduler and more (here is a summary of the results). Needless to say, we will be applying for GSoC 2008 next year as well, and plan to mobilize the community again as soon as Google announces the details of next year's program.

Finally, we also want to give special thanks to Axel Dörfler, Oliver Ruiz Dorantes, Jérôme Duval, Stephan Aßmus, Ryan Leavengood and François Revol, all of whom volunteered as mentors to make it possible for Haiku to have as many as eight students in our GSoC debut. Oliver, Ryan and Stephan were later invited to the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit held last October 6th at the Google Mountain View headquarters, where they proudly represented the Haiku project among many mentors from other open source projects.