FreeBSD at GSoC Mentor Summit

As in previous years, Google held a "Mentor Summit" to bring together representatives from the open source organizations that participated in the Google Summer of Code to share experiences of what worked, what didn't, and generally learn from each other about shepherding students through the program. The mentor summit is always run Unconference-style and it is a great opportunity to meet, learn, and socialize with the many other open source organizations.

In addition to several hours of face to face FreeBSD-related catch-up with Brooks Davis over pizza and beer, I particularly enjoyed catching up with old colleagues and learning about the current state of a variety of other open source projects I use such as R, Boost, NTP, and Ganeti.

This weekend Brooks and I were the only FreeBSD representatives. Given that I'm local and Google sponsors the travel of 2 representatives from each open source organization it's quite unfortunate we couldn't get another FreeBSD mentor here this year. I would strongly encourage some of the other mentors that have never participated in this forum to volunteer to represent FreeBSD next year. This program has funded approximately 117 students to work on FreeBSD over the past 5 years and the mentor summit is best way I know of to improve the experience for students and open source projects next year.

Thanks again to all the FreeBSD mentors that worked with students this summer and hope to see some of you at the post-GSoC Mentor Summit next year...

Strong BSD Showing at GSoC Mentor Summit

This weekend is the Google Summer of Code mentor summit. As in previous years, Google flew out a number of representatives from over a hundred open source projects to talk and brainstorm about making Summer of Code better.


The activities started last night with a hosted dinner at Amarin Thai restaurant, followed by a reception at the Tied House in downtown Mountain View (with open bar!). Kris Kennaway was visiting Google in Mountain View this past week and so was able to join us for drinks and meet some FreeBSD and Open Source developers before flying out Saturday morning. Among many others we met up with Cat Allman, Leslie Hawthorne, Pawel Solyga, Todd Larsen, Randi Harper, James Youngman, Eivind Eklund, and others. Todd and Pawel are working on the next generation summer of code web application, Melange, which will be open source and built on App Engine.

Saturday I arrived late as usual to the mentor summit. I met up with Rafal Jaworowski, Brooks Davis, and Tim Kientzle. I ran into Jeffrey Hsu representing the DragonFly BSD group, and Jacob Appelbaum and Roger Dingledine from the Tor project. Jacob worked with Bill Paul and others on the Cold Boot Attacks on Encryption Keys work and has built a community hacker space in San Francisco. It was also great to bump into Phil Jenvey who used to work with me at Walnut Creek CDROM and BSDi a decade ago, and is now working on Jython.


In the morning I attended a session about bringing new developers into Open Source. After lunch I attended a session on the state of open source scientific computing, and I'm typing this as I prepare for the next session on Melange. Based on the discussions so far I've started writing some more process documentation for how we can run the Summer of Code program more efficiently next summer, including a Student Checklist. Apologies for the blurry photos taken in low light on an iPhone.

There are more sessions this evening and tomorrow, when Sam Leffler is expected to join us. I'll post again after the conclusion of the summit.