Every year after Summer of Code is over, Google hosts a summit at its headquarters in Mountain View to foster sharing of mentors experience, and also to learn first hand what could be improved for next year program.
Today was the first day for the 2008 Mentor Summit, and following the unconference idea, various group of people gather together to discuss Summer of Code and other OSS related topics.
Among other sessions I attended, one was related to "Open source quality through public review notes", and was interesting to see that some communities have very strict review process that can take more then a month, just to accept someone contribution's to its source code repository. My first reaction to this was that this kind of barrier would discourage contributions, and in my view, providing a way for these contributions to be fostered in the community would encourage new members to provide new contributions and the collaboration between different members of the community would raise the contribution to an acceptable level of quality. But I guess this might be acceptable in various large, mature and complex projects.
We also discussed about "How to avoid disappeared students". It was interesting to see various different opinions and disagreements. Among various advices for Mentors, I'll probably be following these two :
- Make sure your student understand that communication is not an option, its mandatory and is reason to failure.
- Be very clear with your student about your expectations, and I would probably advice to agree up front on what criteria will be used during student's mid-term and final evaluation.
And last, but not least....
Thanks Leslie, Summer of Code Mentor Summit rocked today !!!
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