Chris Dudding, package owner over at Nokia, has kindly let us use this post from his blog. Anyone else with best ofs for this week and next?

2009 was a year of first-time events: the first package to be open sourced, the first external contribution, and the first committer outside of Nokia.

I’ve selected 10 memorable events from the past twelve months in the Symbian community. What would you choose?

1. First package owner workshop (January)
New package owners from across the world came together to discuss what being a package owner meant. Open source development experts including Matthias Ettrich, the founder of KDE, presented. Read more from David Wood.

2. Developer website opens for beta testing (March)
There was a lot of interest in the office to see how the developer website would look. I was pleased to be one of the early beta testers.

3. Symbian code is available to members (April)
With the official launch of the developer site, Symbian Foundation members could access the entire codebase.

4. Towel day (May)
The first community event. Read about it from Teemu Rytkönen and watch the video

5. First external contribution (June)
Comms Framework get there first! Remek Zajac wrote about it on the Symbian blog.

6. First package moved to EPL (July)
Craig Heath tells the story of the OS Security package moving to EPL.

7. SEE2009 (October)
Symbian Smartphone show became Symbian Exchange and Exposition. Not just a new name, a different type of event. The introduction of Birds of a Feather sessions were one of the changes. Slides and minutes are available on the wiki.

8. Open source kernel (October)
Have a look at the kernel described by The Register as
“the best kernel and middleware stack for mobiles, with the meanest power management, and years of debugging”.

9. Sun contributes CalDAV and becomes a committer (October)
A significant contribution from Sun, and the first committer outside of Nokia. I used to work on calendar open standards so I’ve been following this feature with interest.

10. Qt 4.6 released (December)
I’m really looking forward to see what Qt can bring to the application suite. QtSQL provides a new way to use our database services too.