WHITEWATER – Google, widely recognized as the world’s largest search engine, prides itself as one of the Internet’s leading technology companies today. To continue this tradition, Google created a program called the Google Summer of Code (GSoC). Scott Inscore, a University of Wisconsin-Whitewater management computer system major, was one of just 1,500 students to be chosen to participate in the Google program.
A strong supporter of the open source software movement, the program allows developers to release the source of their product so other developers can modify and make the product even better. To participate in GSoC students must develop a proposal to write code to enhance a specific open source project.
Inscore wrote a proposal to create Unit Tests for a project called Joomla!. Joomla! is an open source content management system that is widely used around the world to build Web sites and Web applications. His proposal was chosen from more than 7,000 applications from college students in about 90 countries, and there were 90 proposals for the Joomla! project alone. Inscore’s proposal is one of only 15 to be funded by Google.
“I think my proposal stood out because in picking Unit Testing, I chose to do something both very challenging to me and very useful for Joomla!,” Inscore said. “Of course my past programming experience, Joomla! experience and strong academic background all helped. The award-winning Management Computer Systems program at UW-Whitewater also prepared me for this project, and almost certainly helped my proposal.”
After each project is chosen, it’s assigned mentors, and 2,000 mentors were chosen this year including two UW-Whitewater professors.
Through the newly created Wisconsin Center for Internet Technology Services (Wi-CITS), assistant professors John Chenoweth and Paul Ambrose are mentoring a project in Poland as well as for Joomla!, the same project Inscore wrote his proposal for.
“Mentoring these projects is an exciting service opportunity for John Chenoweth and I to share our expertise at a global level,” said Ambrose. “It provides an opportunity to increase the visibility of UW-Whitewater, its faculty and students.”
For more information on Joomla! or other GSoC related projects contact Ambrose at ambrosep@uww.edu or at 262-472-1195
