Missed posting an update last month as I was traveling for a few weeks, but happy to be back for a wrap-up on our summer work!

This past month has seen solid contributions, mostly from our #soc / #gsoc Summer of Code contributors -- which is really encouraging as their projects reach completion. Read more here, including updates from our five #gsoc students!

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PublicLab.org

We've had some key new features hit our site (or be very close to doing so!) recently, including:

• wiki page commenting and inline question buttons by @Ashan (see for example https://publiclab.org/wiki/summer-of-code/comments)
• a bot that can welcome and assist people in our chatrooms (and soon in comments on this site!) by @ryzokuken
• new email notification features to smooth the email/website boundary by @stella
• a new, friendlier power-tagging UI now in prototype stage by @shelbyfire and @lilliankorinek -- see this demo page
• a powerful new way to mark locations without completely giving up location privacy by @mridulnagpal
• an ambitious, pure-JavaScript, in-browser sequential image processing library by @ccpandhare with rich possibilities for our work with #NASA and on the #infragram project

Also,

• A new, rich text Questions form at http://publiclab.org/questions/new (in collaboration with @stevie)
• An almost-ready-to-go Rich Wikis beta, testable at https://publiclab.org/wiki/soc?raw=true, pending some final debugging
• Inline maps, first draft -- see this demo:

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Solr search

This hasn't hit a public interface, but for a couple months, @icarito and I have been running a modded version of @Ujitha's project from last year's #gsoc project, an external Solr search application, on the live site, in the background. This promises to make our search system far more powerful and comprehensive, not to mention faster. Look out for this to hit a usable interface on the site in the next few weeks.

Overall this month, we've had (via Github Pulse):

Excluding merges, 7 authors have pushed 30 commits to all branches. 45 files have changed and there have been 388 additions and 178 deletions.

Software outreach

As our #soc students wrap up their projects, they're posting #first-timers-only issues for their own projects (working from this activity), and several students are getting lots of new contributors, building their own collaborative teams as they wrap up their own work. This will ensure their work lives on, and is supported and build upon even after the summer is over.

Thanks to everyone -- especially the 17 people involved in our Summer of Code programs -- who've been making this summer possible!