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The response for Google Summer of Code this year was amazing. There were at least 6 students who joined the mailing lists to discuss their project ideas and to work with the community on building their proposals, some before we had posted any project ideas for 2010 in JIRA. Due in large part to the increased interest in GSoC, March was the busiest month on the development mailing list (with >180 posts) since April 2004. After the ranking process completed three students (Ishan Jayawardena, Udayanga Wickramasinghe and Sanjaya Liyanage) were selected for XML Schema and XPointer related projects they proposed for Xerces-J. Undoubtedly development activity will increase over the summer with all these new contributors.
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No development activity though some time was spent on cleaning up some old issues in Bugzilla. In particular, we finally got around to responding to the bug report (https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=44426) by the W3C on the excessive number of requests they receive for the same DTDs, XML Schemas and other XML resources. Xerces-J already bundles the XML Commons Resolver and provides documentation on how to use it. While we're sympathetic to their the W3C's plight we feel there's nothing more that we can do, since changing the default behaviour (which has been that way for over 10 years) in Xerces-J has the potential to break a large number of existing applications.
General
We have two new PMC members. Mukul Gandhi and Khaled Noaman were added to the PMC at the beginning of May.