Amarok Blog

Google’s warm reception for all of the summer of code mentors ended a few days ago, and I’ve found some time to get back down under and sort through the piles of emails and rss feeds which have accumulated over the past week. The summit was, in my opinion, much better than last year. Those of us who were returning had experience and knew what to expect and how to make the most of the day. The newbies brought fresh faces and new exciting stories. Not only was the summit better, but the entire summer of code program improved. Efficiency, organisation and stress levels all improved substantially from previous years - and we can only expect it to get better in the upcoming years. This is especially true to KDE, because we hope to play an ever more important role in the program. Maybe you didn’t know, but KDE was the group with the largest student allocations, with 40 students. With more confident and experienced mentors we can strive to recruit more students and mentors to improve KDE and grow our community. Of course, we shouldn’t be just trying to grow our own communities with the summer of code program, but everyones. This was partly the reason for the summit - to share our experiences not only with Google but also with the other organisations. For the most part, KDE successfully managed 40 students, 50 odd mentors and over 200 student applications, and Thiago and I took the opportunity to discuss dealing with scalability issues in the program with some of the other large organisations. Of course, there were many more interesting sessions than our own, and including methods to turn students into long term contributors and cross platform considerations.

Here you can see us (Thiago, Jason and me), the Gnome guys, Leslie Hawthorn (Google SoC organiser) and a random (on the right).

Astutely, one of the attendees noted that the mentor summit has the highest concentration of open source developers at any single event during the year - with nearly 200 representatives and nearly 80 organisations, even more than FOSDEM. This is probably true and really impressed upon me how important this event is. Let’s do even better next year.