A little past the mid-way point at the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit in Mountain View, California. The summit has been great so far — lots of interesting topics (so far, discussions on how to work with students for “umbrella” projects, getting universities involved in open source projects — specifically ways for projects to work with instructors to get their projects into the curricula, and how to deal with disruptive people in projects).

I’ll type up some thoughts on the various topics later after I’ve had a little more time to digest and think about the topics. It looks like we’re going to have a hackfest tomorrow on the university topic, which is awesome. Ran into Pavol Rusnak this morning, but it looks like our tastes in topics differs, since we haven’t been in any of the same talks since.

Some good ideas for openSUSE’s participation in GSoC next year — I think we ought to start looking at recruiting students and getting projects ready much sooner this year — like, starting at the beginning of 2009. One of the common complaints / problems mentioned is that there’s not enough time to get students up to speed with projects even with the additional bonding period. This isn’t really a problem with GSoC per se, just a reflection of the fact that it takes more than a few weeks to really get immersed in the way that any given project works.

By the way, for the chorus of folks who usually ask “where are the pictures?” Google tends to frown on photography inside the buildings, so I’m not going to be making with the photos while in the buildings, unfortunately. Might take a few shots of Mountain View here and there, but nothing GSoC Mentor Summit specific, sorry.

Very pleased with the quality of the summit and the talks so far. Really productive, and I’m absorbing quite a lot…

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