[I'm posting this to netbsd-users for lack of a better public list;
  Beware, this is long!]

For those that haven't followed things too closely, there was a Mentor 
Summit for Google's "Summer of Code" last saturday in Mountain View, 
California. Google invited two mentors/admins from every participating 
GSoC project, and for NetBSD, Alistair Crooks <agc> and I <hubertf> were 
there to chat with people, listen to talks and share our experiences.

To share some of the experience for possible future students and mentors, 
I'm posting my notes for the sessions I was in here, as well as links to 
the Wiki that was used to gether ideas and notes during the summit. Maybe 
we can learn something from it if there's a GSoC in 2008!

Here we go:

   * Before the Summit starts, Al shows me Arena, an interesting script
     language with C/C++ syntax which allows calling arbitrary C
     functions without writing interface libraries (Curses, ...)

   * Screening Students session
     Wiki: http://www.red-bean.com/ospowiki/ScreeningStudents

     Session notes:
      - In proposals, list problems, not solutions, to prevent students
        sending cut&paste applications
      - Advantage of not offering ideas at all are that there's no
        copying, and students need to show more initiative in their
        project proposals
      - Some ideas from the Boost project:
         + Start early: encourage students and mentors, advertize early
         + state expected proposal standards upfront
         + Work with students through their proposals, to identify &
           eliminate non-communicative students
         + State expected ways of communication for things like status
           reports, day-to-day communication, problem resolving,
           etc. ("don't bother applying if you can't answer mail in a
           timely fashion!")
         + State that prior project involvement is a plus - e.g. refer
           to PRs, patches, etc.
         + Show us some of your code you've written so far (if
           available)
         + Think of other plusses, encourage getting them (show source
           code, patches, PRs, ...)
      - Problems encountered in the screening process:
         + Triage process - students submit multiply proposals to
           increase their changes
         + Lead time for setup
         + Project specification
         + Mentor shortage vs. big knowledge (how much can students
           (and mentors?) be expected to know?)
      - Improve GSoC tools to support discussing proposals with
        students and mentors, and keep track of it

   * Cross-Org Mentoring session
     Wiki: http://www.red-bean.com/ospowiki/CrossOrgMentoring

     Session note summary:
      * We identified that there may be two reasons for cross-org
        mentoring: requirement for experts from two domains/projects,
        and desire to merge one work into several orgs/projects
      * Having an upstream project makes things easy
      * See the Wiki for some other problems that we identified but
        didn't find immediate answers
      * The GSoC tools should allow a student to send a project
        proposal to several orgs, and assist us in starting
        communication between orgs

     Full session notes:
     http://www.red-bean.com/ospowiki/SessionNotes/CrossOrgMentoring

   * Mentoring Best Practices - 13:00 Tripolis: Robert Wilson, FreeBSD
     Wiki: -

     Session notes:
      - Questions to start with:
         + In internship, mentoring is very important - teaching company
           culture etc.
         + Position of mentor - collegue or boss?
         + Alignment of GSoC with other (existing) mentorships - e.g. that
           of new developers ("sponsorship" in NetBSD)
         + Do students make good mentors?
         + Should you choose "new" students or existing developers?
 	+ Are good code hackers make good GSoC students?
 	+ What are realistic expectations that can be made from
           students?
 	+ How do students find whom to talk to for hashing out ideas
           for proposals? (NetBSD: tech lists)
 	+ How many students can a mentor handle?
      - Offering project proposal templates is useful!
      - Ask prospetive students for references (professors, ...)
      - Mentors shouldn't underestimate the effort needed for
        mentoring. Having guidelines of what's expected by mentors
        helps here.
      - Early interview students - helps out weeding out "bad" ones (be
        careful about language issues - maybe have the interview with
        someone in a student's first language, if a possible mentor
        with both language and domain skills is available)
      - Students appreciate structure, e.g. by weekly reports
      - Have backup mentors, if real-life kicks in

   * Poisonous People - 13:30 Tripolis: Ben Collins-Sussman, Brian Fitzpatrick
     Slides: http://www.red-bean.com/dav/presentations/Poisonous-people.pdf

     XXX Excellent talk!

   * Summer of Content session - 14:30 Algiers
     Wiki: http://www.red-bean.com/ospowiki/SummerOfContent

     Session notes:
      - Google's definitely interested in improving Open Source
        Documentation!!! - says Google's Leslie Hawthorne
      - Idea from Fedora on how to keep documentation in sync with
        code: add "documentation tags" to the CVS commit message to send
        notifications for updates of specific areas (corresponding to
        the tag) XXX now if NetBSD *had* a documentation team...
      - What license to choose: FDL, CC, ...
      - What Formats to target: DocBook/XML, Wiki, SVG, ...
      - Target people: students? Technical writers? How to attract them?
      - Guidelines to give?
      - Maintenance of existing documentation as part?
      - Content: technical, not/less artist
      - Summer of Content or Summer of Documentation>
      - Lots of input from Bart Mossay, Portland State Univ.

  * Sticky questions & wrapup: Tunis
    Wiki: -

    Session notes:
     - Google people will decide if there will be another GSoC in 2007
       at about November 2006, the whole preparations should start
       rolling earlier, maybe February 2007
     - For NetBSD, we/comm-exec should/I will work on
        + our list of suggested projects
          (http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/projects.html)
        + our list of questions we'd like to see answeres in
          applications
          (http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/soc-application.html)
     - If a future GSoC will happen, students will be required to blog,
       which will allos putting all students' blogs into 1 site
       ("planet"/syndication, comparable to www.onetbsd.org) and allow
       giving everyone (not only mentors) easier ways for
       commenting. (At least that's the idea :)

I'm sure there's something of interest for people in there. Feel free to 
comment and draw your conclusions. If you want to send me input for 
http://www.netbsd.org/contrib/soc-application.xml let me know!

I'll post a bit more in my weblog about the rest of the whole trip in my 
weblog, but I guess the above is most on-topic here.

Enjoy!


  - Hubert