The lead up to and spike in 2013 was likely partly due to the GNU project's 30th birthday. To celebrate, version 0.5 of the GNU Hurd was released September 2013. Also, it appears the 2012 and 2013 Summer of Code sessions had some influence. As I am very eager to use a pure GNU Hurd-based OS in future projects, I do hope we see more activity and interest. Summer of Code is a good idea and maybe simply celebrating every birthday moving forward with a hackathon would help (wink).