Last Saturday, one hundred mentors and administrators for organizations who
successfully completed GSoC visited
Google's Mountain View Headquarters for the first Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit.
Structured as an unconference, the summit provided the attendees from disparate projects the
opportunity to meet, network and find common ground in the pursuit of making the program and
open source development even more successful.
While the attendee-led
session topics were as diverse as the attendees themselves, there was a primary focus on
attracting and retaining the best student developers through GSoC. We were also fortunate
enough to have three former GSoC students present to the audience about the program from the
student's perspective.
Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman, both
software engineers on Google's Open Source
Team, offered their views on building effective project communities in their popular
Poisonous
People Talk. One of our attendees organized an all day session focused purely on
brainstorming and open discussion, with spectacular results.
Thanks to all our guests for helping us create such an inspiring environment
at the summit, and for their valuable feedback in helping us improve Google Summer of
Code.
