GSoC: Cleaning The Backside of Open Source

I began writing this from a conference room buried within the Google Campus in Mountain View, CA at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit. I recall being relaxed as I look out into the courtyard at Google where Stan, a T-Rex skeleton, stands motionless yet happy with a couple pink flamingos in his mouth (seriously, I can’t make stuff like this up). Dirk, Blaine and I were fortunate to represent Geeklog as mentors for the Summer of Code program of which you can read a brief recap here. Probably most notable about this weekend is after roughly seven years of working together we all were able to meet face-to-face for the first time! Again, thanks to Google for making that possible.

Let me say that I am a happy man, a man cleansed by a weekend focused on discussing efforts that many college students made contributing to open source development thanks to Google. I got to listen to Dirk, the lead maintainer of the Geeklog 1.x branch, give a talk about spam on the web…particularly with relation to content management systems like Geeklog (hopefully his slides will be available soon). Geeklog is very fortunate to have Dirk, a self proclaimed hater of all forms of spam, as one of the project leads. In addition to Dirk’s I was able to hear a number of other discussions such as how to get more women involved in opens source development (I am now a member of one of the Linux Chix mailing lists), I got to hear some of the GSoC success and failure stories and I got the chance to talk about the user of open source software in government and more importantly the lack of inter-government collaboration on software projects. So what was so cleansing about the summit?

Well, let me start with the heated toilet seats with built-in bidet. No, I’m not kidding…not to take anything away from Google or the summit but, damn, when I sat down I was in heaven. I stayed on the commode until my legs fell asleep. Think I’m lying? Well let’s just say I loved it so much I wrote down the name of the manufacturer of the seat, Toto, and even did a Google search to find the seats. This article is doomed as it now lacks any degree of professionalism but let me just try to recover by giving a serious recap on the Google Summer of Code summit from my perspective.

One of the things Dirk, Blaine and I agreed on is while we were fortunate enough to get accepted this year this is a lot of room for improvement. Specifically consider the benefits of:

• Have a PHP code test like the one Silverstrip had
• Consider using the combination of VNC and Skype for collaboration and communication.
• May be worth choosing the mentors AFTER the students are picked to ensure best fit (both geographically and personality-wise).
• Weekly Blog entries (which can replace status reports) on Geeklog.net.
• Project ideas should involve the community and factor in bounties. We need to set a
  schedule for next year’s program to ensure we do a better job selecting projects and good students to take them on.
• Include public profiles of mentors and students (probably all active contributors now that I think about it)
• Consider having SCM (CVS or SVN) repository just for GSoC students

Additionally we had the chance to talk about more broad project issues that are still outstanding:

• Do we need formal mentoring outside of GSoc? If we can encourage new blood to try working on the team we should probably use similar mentoring techniques.
• Do we need formalize how to earn CVS commit rights?
• Do we need to do more beta, even alpha releases? While Geeklog’s stability is one of it’s crowning jewels, having more alpha and beta releases might encourage more community involvement
• Consider using the VNC/Skype for general web-cast type of things. This may also encourage further community involvement. This could be akin to brown-bag lunches or Lunch-and-Learns.

Granted, this isn’t a huge list but, hey, it was a short weekend that gave us only a few hours to talk in between the talks and whatnot. Hopefully the GSoC summit will get us re-engaged and I would expect that a few things will change not only with how we approach the 2008 GSoC (which the should start the selection process in February) but also how we handle day-to-day management of the project.

I’ll try to post a few related links here from Dirk and Blaine once they have time to get home and settled in.