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With over 40 new open source organizations participating in this year’s Google Summer of Code, we are excited to introduce a few every Friday in our weekly blog series. This week we have three organizations, RoboComp, BEAM Community, and Mifos X, all describing their student’s projects below.

RoboComp is an open-source robotics framework that uses software component technology to achieve its goals of efficiency, ease of use, reusability and hardware abstraction. RoboComp boosts distributed software development and collaboration by providing an easy method of integrating components made by different RoboComp users. Components made with RoboComp can be distributed over several cores or computers. However, RoboComp is not just a set of software components, it also provides a set of tools that make component creation and management a pleasant experience. 

For Google Summer of Code 2013 we have two talented students working with us. Silvia Stegaru is working on our Components Management Tool, a visual management tool that helps developers easily deploy and manage component networks. Our other student, Jose Franco, is adding full physics support to the RCSimulator, RoboComp's robotic simulator using the Bullet physics engine.  

By Marco Antonio Gutierrez, RoboComp Organization Administrator

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The BEAM Community is an organization that supports projects that run on the Erlang VM. The Erlang VM was originally designed by Ericsson to support distributed, fault tolerant, soft real-time, non-stop applications. Many companies around the world like Amazon, Heroku and Activision use the Erlang VM in their stack and open source projects like CouchDB and Riak are built on top of it. 

Given the diversity of projects hosted by the BEAM Community, Gustavo Brunoro is improving the debugging tools in the Elixir programming language, Patrick Pettersson is implementing a rebalancing mechanism for Disco's distributed file system while Mawuli Adzaku is bringing a full-featured module manager to the Zotonic web framework. Last but not least, Uvarov Michael and Aman Mangal are respectively working on a message archive implementation for the MongooseIM XMPP Server and on a package manager for the BEAM Community based on the early work and supervised by Erlware. 

We hope students will find the same joy working with the Erlang VM as we have and become active members of our vibrant community! 

By Jose Valim, BEAM Community Google Summer of Code Organization Administrator

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 Mifos X is an open source cloud-based platform for delivering financial services to the poor. The Community for Open Source Microfinance (COSM) guides the development of the platform and the community sustaining it. We use open source technology and the power of community to scale financial inclusion worldwide to achieve our shared vision of creating a world of 3 Billion Maries, a world where each individual has access to the financial services to create a better life for themselves and their family. We connect the on-the-ground organizations serving the base of the pyramid with open source contributors building applications on top of the platform to enable financial inclusion to the poor. We cultivate a network of local service providers, Mifos Specialists, who sustainably provide a range of support and consulting services to scale Mifos adoption worldwide. 

COSM has grown and evolved from the Mifos Initiative which was launched by Grameen Foundation in 2006 and spun out in 2011. Currently more than 1.1 million clients are being served by the 45 microfinance institutions using Mifos to run their organization. Mifos is the back-end information system used to process, track, manage, and report on the portfolio of financial services they’re delivering to their client base. 

We're proud to be working with an awesome and invigorated class of four students for Google Summer of Code 2013 who are contributing across all areas of the Mifos X platform. Anuruddha Premalal of Sri Lanka will focus on the back-end, strengthening the core platform through Server-Side Pagination and Multi-Tenant Caching. Yanna Wu from China is familiar with the XBRL taxonomy so she was a natural fit to work on XBRL Integration for MIX Market. Andreas Weigel from Germany has shown strong front-end development skills and will work on the User-Generated Documents project. Avik Ganguly based out of India has shown a fervent interest in all areas of the platform and is ready to tackle an important project creating an Initial Data Import Tool under the mentorship of Udai. 

By Ed Cable - Director of Community Programs at the Community for Open Source Microfinance (Mifos) and Admin for 2013 Google Summer of Code

Over the last month we have highlighted 18 of the 40 new organizations participating in Google Summer of Code this year. Stay tuned each Friday as we continue to highlight more organizations. To view a complete list of the projects the 1192 students are working on this summer you can visit the Google Summer of Code program site.

By Stephanie Taylor, Open Source Programs