Notes from the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2016

[Boudhayan Gupta]

Hi all,

I'm writing this from SFO airport waiting for the flight back to New
Delhi after a very fulfilling GSoC Mentor Summit at Google Tech
Corners in Sunnyvale. While it's standard for two people from each
organisation to attend the summit, we had four people from KDE
attending the summit this time: Valorie Zimmerman, Alexander Semke,
Akarsh Simha, and myself.

I'm going to write my notes on what we got done at the summit, and the
others who attended can probably add to this list after they've gotten
home. So here goes:

* We spoke to Google about hosting bits of KDE Infrastructure on
Google Cloud Platform. Discussions about the technical and financial
aspects of this project will begin internally and with Google as soon
as possible.

* I proposed a session on handling spam generated by sweatshops, the
kind we get on Bugzilla, the wikis and the rest. Then I was unable to
attend the session because we became victims of a criminal act - we're
all okay - but when I got to the room during the last 15 minutes of
the session, I was pleasantly surprised to find that others had taken
the topic and run with it. It turned out to be very productive, and we
have decided to set up a cross-project task force to share ideas,
resources and tackle this problem together.

* There was a lot of networking, some bugfixing, and generally fooling
around Google's buildings. We weren't allowed to take pictures, so we
can't share anything there. I personally shot for a promo video for
GSoC that Google will be using in their promo material.

* While the specifics are for Google to annouce, stay tuned for some
major (and I mean MAJOR) changes to the programme next year! We
participated in various session about feedback about the current
edition and changes for future editions, and we had some
cross-pollintation about setting mentoring standards for ourselves.
The fallout from these sessions will be discussed in more targeted
threads later.

Thanks,
Boudhayan Gupta
Sysadmin/CWG