While we've had a Wave developer event or two (or three!) here at the Googleplex, community groups are having an amazing number of them all over the world. The community-organized events are a great way to meet and work with local developers. Below are a handful of the ones we know about. (These events aren't Google sponsored, but we participate where and when possible. Follow the event links for details.)

Recent Events

Date	Event	Group
7/18–7/19	Bangkok Google Wave Hackathon	——
7/22	San Diego Google Wave Hackathon	San Diego GTUG (Google Technology User Group)
7/25	Bangalore GTUG Launch Event	Bangalore GTUG
7/27	Tokyo Google Wave Weekend Hackathon (Japanese)	——
7/30	Sydney Wave User Group Inaugural Event	Sydney Wave User Group

Upcoming Events

Date	Event	Group
8/1–8/2	Düsseldorf Google Wave Hackathon (German)	Düsseldorf GTUG (German)
8/3	Bay Area Google Wave August Meetup	Bay Area Google Wave Meetup Group
8/7–8/9	GTUG Campout: Silicon Valley	Silicon Valley GTUG
8/8	Canberra Google Wave Hackathon Day	——
8/20	San Francisco Google Wave August Meetup	San Francisco Google Wave Meetup Group

You can find a more complete list of events on the Google Code calendar. And, if you're planning an event of your own, spread the word! Click the Add an event button to add yours to the calendar.

Posted by Brian Kennish, Google Developer Advocate

Following Monday’s API Hackathon, we hosted Federation Day, which included 150 developers interested in learning more about Google Wave, contributing to the Google Wave Federation Protocol, and providing their own wave services. While these are still early days for the federation protocol and open source project, our vision for Wave recognizes the importance of encouraging and promoting third-party implementations, so users and businesses are able to customize and manage everything from the ground up (features, data, etc).

To kickoff Federation Day, we open sourced two components: 1) the Operational Transform (OT) code and the underlying wave model, and 2) a basic client/server prototype that uses the wave protocol. The OT code is the heart and soul of the collaborative experience in Google Wave and we plan that code will evolve into the production-quality reference implementation. The prototype is intended primarily as a simple "hello, world" implementation, to encourage experimentation using the Google Wave Federation Protocol. All of this code -- nearly 40,000 lines of Java code -- is available under the Apache 2.0 license, and we'll be open sourcing more code as wave evolves. Check out the source code and get started with the introductory documentation.

Since Google I/O, we've been iterating on the draft protocol specification, and have made substantial enhancements to the Operational Transformation algorithm -- to the point where the open source code is actually ahead of the algorithm implemented in our servers in production. We've also Creative Commons licensed the protocol specification, the whitepapers and the Google Wave APIs documentation.

Next up, we are working towards using the new Operational Transform code in our own production systems, and opening up the federation port on WaveSandbox.com (and later the wave.google.com instance).

To get more details about these updates, please check out this status note. Looking forward to seeing you on the forum!

Posted by Jochen Bekmann and Sam Thorogood, Software Engineers, Google Wave

The Google Wave API Hackathon in Mountain View is off to a good start with over 150 people from places as faraway as New Zealand and the Netherlands coding at the Googleplex.

(Photo credit: James D. Peterson)

Over the last seven weeks we've seen some early examples of how developers have used the Google Wave APIs, some of which are posted on the Google Wave Samples Gallery. The projects listed in the samples gallery also include source code, so they can serve as a good reference for you. To highlight a few, there's:

• Groupy-the-bot: A robot, written in Python, that enables users to create groups and manage their own subscriptions.
• Floodit Game: A competitive gadget game where users take turns capturing as many squares as possible.
• Waves in WordPress: A neat use of the embed API that makes it easy to put waves in a post or page on WordPress.

On the Google Wave team, we've also been hard at work improving the sandbox's stability and performance, as well as enhancing the APIs available: the UI and speed of gadget rendering, enabling cleaner gadget --> robot communication, and we've open sourced the Robots Java API. For those developers out there looking to get started, as we blogged last week, we’ve already rolled out roughly 6,000 developer accounts and we’re working through an additional 20,000 requests over the course of the next month. If you haven't done so already, you’re welcome to request a sandbox account. In other news: this morning we announced that we plan to start extending the Google Wave preview beyond developers on September 30th. This will take place on wave.google.com rather than the separate "sandbox" instance we are currently using, and we plan to involve about 100,000 users. In addition to the developers already using Wave, we will invite groups of users from the hundreds of thousands who offered to help report bugs when they signed up on wave.google.com. Leading up to that rollout, we’re focusing on improving the speed, stability and usability of Google Wave. This includes of course addressing many of the issues highlighted by the developers in the sandbox thus far (thanks for your feedback!). We're also continuing to expand the Google Wave APIs, and we'd love your feedback on the forum. As we have mentioned in the past, our goal is that extensions built by third parties feel fully on-par with Google Wave's native features to users. We know we have some way to go and really appreciate your help in getting there. Stay tuned for more updates from tomorrow's Google Wave Federation Day. Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave

It's been quite a whirlwind since we demonstrated Google Wave at Google I/O and began giving developers access to a preview on the Google Wave Sandbox. We really appreciate the excitement and enthusiasm from the developer community for the Google Wave API.

Thus far, we've given sandbox access to about 5,800 attendees of Google I/O, the Google Developers Days in China, Japan, and Brazil, and various other events. We have also started activating the more than 20,000 requests submitted on the Google Wave Sandbox Request Form. If you haven't sent in your request, please take a moment to do so.

We are gradually ramping up capacity on the sandbox, and expect to finish activating all 20,000 requests within the next month. We'll start with those that indicated high "pain tolerance" on the form and are planning large projects, but otherwise using a first come, first served basis.

Finally, a reminder about office hours: each week the Wave engineering team provides live Q&A for all questions relating to the Wave APIs (robots, gadgets, and embed). To cater to developers around the world, we now alternate between 2 time slots every other Wednesdays:

• July 22: 9pm - 10pm PDT
• July 29: 11am - 12pm PDT
• August 5: 9pm - 10pm PDT
• August 12: 11am - 12pm PDT
• And so on...

See the full schedule on the Google Developer Events Calendar (which you can add to your own calendar using the links at the bottom of the page). The transcripts for the office hours will be posted within 24 hours to the Google Wave API Group for everyone to read.

If you do not yet have sandbox access, you can always go to Google Wave API Group to post questions and to connect with other Wave developers. If you only want to receive our official updates and announcements, you can subscribe to the Google Wave Sandbox Announcement Group.

Posted by Austin Chau, Google Developer Programs Engineer

Since the developer release a month ago, the engineering team has flown across the world talking to developers and explaining how Google Wave works - like at Google I/O in San Francisco, and most recently, at GDD Brazil in Sao Paolo. The team loves meeting developers everywhere - and of course, tasting their local delicacies (like sweet potato ice cream in Japan and pão de queijo in Brazil) - but at some point, they have to get back to actually engineering this whole Wave thing.

So, to make sure that other developers can still learn about Google Wave straight from the engineers' mouths, we've added a media gallery to the docs that links to various videos and slides. You can watch talks like "Programming with Google Wave", "Google Wave: Powered by GWT", "Google Wave: Under the Hood", among others.

If you're a developer thinking about presenting about Google Wave at your local developer events, you can use these presentations as a basis, and if you come up with your own set of slides or have a recording of your talk, let us know in the forum so that we can add them to the gallery.

Posted by Pamela Fox, Developer Relations

On July 20th and 21st the Google Wave team is organizing a couple of events at the Googleplex that'll give you an opportunity to dive into hacking on the Google Wave APIs and learn more about the Google Wave Federation Protocol.

As described on the hackathon agenda, on Monday (July 20th), we'll kick things off exploring the various APIs for Google Wave (with demos, of course), we'll chat over lunch, and then have open time for hacking with the Google Wave team sitting just a chair or so over. If you'd like to attend the event, please check out this form.

Following that event, on Tuesday (July 21st), we have Google Wave Federation Day -- the inaugural event for people who are looking to get involved by providing their own wave services. We'll discuss in depth the underlying protocol and system architecture, and show some new demos that illustrate how the system works. After lunch, we'll have discussion sessions to brainstorm about some of the technology (e.g. Operational Transformation) and the challenges (e.g. Spam). If you are interested in attending, please submit this form.

Both events will be held at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA. Lunch, wifi, and power will be provided.

Hope to see you there!

Posted by Dan Peterson, Product Manager, Google Wave