Hi everybody, (The following is a condensed version of a post on my blog with anecdotal content and information not relevant for MacPorts removed. If you have too much time on your hands, you can find the full version at https://neverpanic.de/blog/2017/10/29/attending-the-google-summer-of-code-mentor-summit/)
>From Friday, October 13th to Sunday, October 15th 2017 I attended the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit for MacPorts. Unfortunately Jackson Iscaac's visa was denied, so Mojca Miklavec joined me instead. The weekend started off on Friday night with dinner and an opening talk by the conference organizers at the summit location Google Tech Corners. The two remaining days were almost entirely reserved for unconference sessions on various topics. I attended a number of different sessions but also extensively used the “hallway track” to get in touch with others in open source. I will list some notable sessions below. ## Grading Criteria for Proposals A discussion on how to avoid personal preferences and bias when choosing proposals. There were a lot of good ideas and we ended up summarizing that there should be a list of criteria published before GSoC and available for students to grade technical and social skills as well as the project and its planning. My personal takeaway from this session was that GSoC consists of a lot of small projects that only have less than five students, and big projects are surprisingly uncommon. (Detailed meeting minutes for this session are available. Contact me if you are interested.) ## Google Track: What More? A brainstorming discussion on what Google could do besides Google Summer of Code to help open source projects. There were a lot of different ideas, but from what I recall none of them were an obvious no-brainer. I asked whether Google could provide build capacity, which was backed by the Homebrew representative and some other audience members. I would be very surprised if this was feasible for Google, though. ## Organizational Homes for FOSS Projects This loose discussion on different umbrella projects was hosted by Software Freedom Conservancy’s Brett Smith. I learned that openSUSE is not only the open source version of the SUSE distribution, but also an umbrella for various other projects. Unfortunately, this did not contain as much information on the option to join conservancy as I had hoped for MacPorts. We should possibly follow up on this topic separately. ## Convincing Large Companies to Use Open Source Largely a discussion on which licenses are company-friendly and which ones are not. Mentioned some of the problems companies face and where open source could help, such as making license compliance easy by providing machine-readable license specifications (e.g. using SPDX). >From a MacPorts point of view, we should probably consider adapting the standardized identifiers from the SPDX license list (https://spdx.org/licenses/) for our license field. Unfortunately that would be some additional effort for licenses we did not distinguish so far, such as the various BSD-style licenses. ## Fail Your Students! Facilitated by the GSoC organization team, this discussion allowed mentors to align on when and how to fail students. In quite a number of cases it seems that if you are asking yourself the question whether to fail the student the answer is likely “yes”. Google has an interest in keeping the bar for successful GSoC participation high and does not want mentors to waste their time. I learned that mentor availability is the biggest scalability problem with Google Summer of Code, not student availability or financial reasons. Additionally, suggesting the student withdraw before failing him may make the decision easier for mentors and less harsh for students. In addition to the various sessions, meeting other people in the hallways or over lunch was an interesting and very rewarding experience. I met (among many others) William Woodruff from the Homebrew project, and not only did we get along very well, but we also noticed that both Homebrew and MacPorts face a number of similar problems such as build CPU cycle availability in their endeavor to bring open source software to the Mac. Overall, the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit was a fascinating experience and very well organized. I had a blast at the conference, learned a lot of new things and met many interesting people. I would definitely attend again. Mojca may be able to fill in some other spots and/or sessions I have not attended. I understand she may still be travelling though, so it may be a while. -- Clemens
