GSOC Mentor Summit 2010
For the second year, Adam Monsen and I attended the Google Summer of Code 2010 Mentor Summit. This year's summit was held on October 23 and 24, at Google Headquarters.
We knew more what to expect this year, and maybe that's why I felt I even got more out of this year's meetings. Last year, I kind of stood back and attended a few of the sessions I was interested in. This year, in addition to attending some cool sessions, I hosted two sessions: "GSOC in Africa" (http://openetherpad.org/gsoc-in-africa), and "Audio and Video for Distributed Teams" (http://openetherpad.org/AudioVideoDistributedTeams) .
The GSOC in Africa was the most lively session I was part of the whole weekend. We had other HFOSS teams like OpenMRS and Sahana in the room, and we are passionate about growing GSOC from one student in all of Africa in 2010 GSOC! The meeting morphed into a "emerging countries" meeting, as there are clearly some underrepresented regions beyond Africa. Carol Smith from Google joined the end of our session and gave the group good encouragement to go forward. We have a sub group of folks exchanging ideas as we ramp up recruitment for 2011.
On the Audio Video front, it was fun to hear how others manage with a distributed team. We were lucky enough to have a developer from BigBlueButton in the room to answer some questions and get our feedback on what we would like to see from their collaboration tool.
You can read more about the summit on the summit wiki (http://gsoc-wiki.osuosl.org/index.php/2010). The wiki gives details on which teams attended and notes on over 60 sessions.
