I've been the Parrot Grant Manager for a little over two years now, and that gives me an interesting position to observe its progress. I'm not really involved in the code side of the project, but I do pay attention to developments at a high level.
To be honest, most of the time as the grant manager was somewhat depressing. Not a lot seemed to be getting done, and I couldn't authorize any milestone payments. That in turn made us look bad in the eyes of our major funder, NLNet.
In the past six months or so I've seen a really amazing jumpstart of the project. A lot of credit for this goes to Allison Randal. She came up with a very aggressive schedule (towards the bottom of the page) and has been sticking to it, and I think her energy and hard work is motivating others as well.
For the first time in a while, I actually feel like Parrot is more than just a cool idea, it's a project that's going somewhere.
I'd also like to point out that there is some money available for people who work on Parrot. If you take a look at the schedule there are lots of milestones in the future. Many of them have Allison's name next to them, but I'm sure she'd be happy to have others pitch in. Each milestone is worth $2,000 on completion.
