As in the years ago Google invited mentors from each Google Summer of Code project to its headquarters in Mountain View, California. We would like to share our experience with you.
The Google Summer of Code (GSoC) Mentor Summit was held during the weekend of October 23rd and 24th. For the summit Google invites two mentors of each project. This year we sent Karsten who mentored Karol Gusak's FLOW3 i18n/l10n project and Ingo who mentored Pascal Jungblut's community extension project and also took care of general GSoC administration. The summit kicked of on Friday night with a first get-together with food, beverages, and making first contacts with other mentors from the other projects.
Saturday morning started off with breakfast at Charlie's Cafe at the Googleplex. After that Carol Smith and Cat Allman kicked off the Mentor Summit and welcomed all the organizations. Along a barcamp or unconference style of organization participants posted session ideas to a wall which then were voted on to determine the room sizes required for each session. Like last year we set up a CMS session to talk web stuff with other related projects. Topics for the sessions reached from more general sessions, relevant for all projects like documentation, SCM, and managing and mentoring GSoC to more specific session. Also other session were rather purely fun related: "Chocolate and motivation in Open Source" and "Advanced Trolling".
Saturday night we then had the Mentor Summit pool party back at the hotel with foods and drinks again. Unfortunately the weather was not as good as last year so that nobody went to the pool, the hot tub was a nice place to be though.
Sunday again started with breakfast at Google and then went on with sessions again. The CMS session we set up was well visited with mentors from Drupal, Wordpress, BuddyPress, Midgard, Plone, MediaWiki, Geeklog and others. We started off with everybody introducing himself and talking about what happened within each project since last years meeting. A general tendency in the Open Source world seems to be the move to decentralized version control systems like git. Since most of the attending project run on PHP another topic was minimum PHP versions, WordPress in this regard is just in the process of ending support for PHP4. Testing code also was one of the hot topics were we learned that Wordpress doesn't do dedicated testing and Drupal is using functional testing rather than unit testing because of its architecture.
The mentor summit ended in the afternoon with a discussion about whether Google should extend the size of GSoC. What at first seems to be a trivial question to answer turned out to involve a lot of work for some people involved in organizing GSoC. In the end chances of seeing GSoC return next year with more projects and students seem to be good though.
The general atmosphere was great and people were sharing a great Open Source spirit. It was good to meet people from last years mentor summit again, to reconnect, and see how their projects progressed since then.
Apart from having been at the mentor summit in Mountain View I'm also happy to being able to attend ApacheCon in Atlanta, Georgia this week. I've already met with people who also were at the mentor summit to again talk about general Open Source community topics and GSoC. For organizing our participation in GSoC it was in particular great talking to Ross Gardler, Vice President of Communty Development at the Apache Software Foundation, as it's interesting to see how such big organizations handle GSoC. The ASF has published their rating criteria for students and we certainly can improve our process by learning from the ASF and other GSoC organizations, too.
As a final note I'd like to thank Leslie Hawthorn, responsible for GSoC in the past and at the beginning of this years GSoC, Carol Smith, who took over the organization of GSoC and certainly had to fill big shoes, Cat Allman, and the Google Open Source Programs Office for organizing the GSoC and all the efforts they put into it. Thanks for making a difference!
