Mentor Summit Wrap-up
October 9, 2007 – 7:47 pmGoogle’s warm reception for all of the summer of code mentors ended a few days ago, and I’ve found some time to get back down under and sort through the piles of emails and rss feeds which have accumulated over the past week. The summit was, in my opinion, much better than last year. Those of us who were returning had experience and knew what to expect and how to make the most of the day. The newbies brought fresh faces and new exciting stories. Not only was the summit better, but the entire summer of code program improved. Efficiency, organisation and stress levels all improved substantially from previous years - and we can only expect it to get better in the upcoming years. This is especially true to KDE, because we hope to play an ever more important role in the program. Maybe you didn’t know, but KDE was the group with the largest student allocations, with 40 students. With more confident and experienced mentors we can strive to recruit more students and mentors to improve KDE and grow our community. Of course, we shouldn’t be just trying to grow our own communities with the summer of code program, but everyones. This was partly the reason for the summit - to share our experiences not only with Google but also with the other organisations. For the most part, KDE successfully managed 40 students, 50 odd mentors and over 200 student applications, and Thiago and I took the opportunity to discuss dealing with scalability issues in the program with some of the other large organisations. Of course, there were many more interesting sessions than our own, and including methods to turn students into long term contributors and cross platform considerations.
Here you can see us (Thiago, Jason and me), the Gnome guys, Leslie Hawthorn (Google SoC organiser) and a random (on the right).
Astutely, one of the attendees noted that the mentor summit has the highest concentration of open source developers at any single event during the year - with nearly 200 representatives and nearly 80 organisations, even more than FOSDEM. This is probably true and really impressed upon me how important this event is. Let’s do even better next year.
5 Responses to “Mentor Summit Wrap-up”
“This is especially true to KDE, because we hope to play an ever more important role in the program. Maybe you didn’t know, but KDE was the group with the largest student allocations, with 40 students”
That’s great! Is this including the KOffice project, too (I understand that there’s been some dispute in the past as to whether this is part of KDE from GSoC’s point of view … ?). If not, that’s very impressive indeed!
Are there any figures on per-project completion and retention rates, and whether the code ended up being used at all? I remember some very promising GSoC mini-projects for other projects (not KDE) that were completed successfully but ended up not being incorporated into the project itself and being left to die :/
By Anon on Oct 9, 2007
Yes, KOffice is regarded of being part of the KDE umbrella group, and will most likely stay like this. Ultimately it gives us KDE admin a choice in how to split up the student allocations instead of leaving the job to Google.
If you want some more information about other summer of code projects, I recommend browsing through the official blog at http://googlesummerofcode.blogspot.com/
Figures range dramatically from project to project, so I can’t quote any numbers.
By Seb on Oct 9, 2007
I’d really like to be part of this next year. I’m a college student at Santa Clara, so maybe in a few months I’ll start asking around and see if I’m qualified to participate. I think it would be so much fun to meet all the people who make my desktop and contribute to it.
By Level 1 on Oct 10, 2007
The random on the right in that photo is Sigurd Magnusson from the Silverstripe project (http://www.silverstripe.co.nz).
By Jonathan Giles on Oct 10, 2007
Had an AWESOME time with you and Thiago, Seb!! =;) And I totally agree with your comments. I am still blown away by just how cool it was with all of the different open source projects represented at the summit. I’m very excited to see if we can do better next year. =:)
By vanRijn on Oct 15, 2007