[Soc-coordination] Mentor summit

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,
> USA. We have been invited to send up to 3 mentors along to take
> part. Who's interested in going? :-)

Whoa, 3 this time? :-) I'm again interested in going there.
Mostly for meeting some of the other organizations folks again (such as
marty connor from etherboot, angie byron from drupal, christel from
gentoo, karsten wade of fedora fame, just to name a few prominent
figures I've met last year) etc.
Since I didn't have a student this year (too few slots), I'd of course
give precedence to anyone who was actually mentoring this year. We
definitely should have someone of this years mentors there, too.
For the record: I still have a copy of last years final and interim
review reports around, in case you're interested in reading the status
reports of last year. Note that the Mentor Summit's focus wasn't so much
about "how well has you organization been doing at this years GSoC", but
more about getting organizations to know each other and link up. This is
somewhat difficult, since e.g. Debian and the OGRE 3D engine don't have
that much in common, but it's still very interesting to meet people in
real life and there is some GSoC-related experience to be shared as
well.

One thing I was somewhat lacking last year was a kind of 'briefing', as
of what you'd like 'us' (that is whoever is going there) to discuss with
the other organizations and with Google. This will mostly be topics
related to other distributions, I guess, but it could be a very
interesting (and challenging) task to e.g. do some discussion about
integrating e.g. PHP/Java/... applications with Debian (which have
different release cycles, different upgrade mechanisms, actually a
totally different view of the 'world' etc. - for example GNOME people
are used to having the distribution ship the GNOME libraries and handle
security updates for them; Java applications are used to bringing along
their own copy of some .jar files of libraries they were tested with)

Last year, the attendees were provided with a couple of rooms we could
schedule ourselves for work sessions. There was one large room for
bigger talks (e.g. dealing with 'poisonous people' by some google folks,
just search for it and you'll find a video - i think it has been
recorded a few times. a very insightful talk, and useful for all DDs...)
So if you have some talk ready where you think other organizations might
be interested in, you should definitely go there!
The other rooms were rather small, usually well-suited for like 5-10
people. So if you published a proposal early enough, you could gather a
few people there and get some interesting cross-project discussions
done. Don't expect much work to happen there, but getting to know
relevant people face-to-face is very valuable!

There are some topics we could propose, but it would require some
preparation, especially from people involved in these topics.
If could be an interesting opportunity to do some cross-distribution
coordination, for example. Maybe a talk "a distributors view of the
software world - offering security support and clean upgrade paths"
could be valuable for some PHP or Java application developers, just as
an example.

On a side note: I was not spammed by Google recruiting there last year.
They were very polite; you were given some Google swag upon arrival, and
of course you were in the Google building so it was Google colors
everywhere, but it was not as if they were trying all the time to
recruit you. I guess they're smart enough to understand that you're
probably already aware of the job opportunities there and thus chose to
go with the less intrusive "we're here, supporting you" approach.

best regards,
Erich Schubert
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