So, the GSoC mentor summit was pure awesome. I've had virtually no unconference/barcamp experience, and I knew the level of smarts would be extremely high, so I was a bit nervous at first about being overwhelmed, or that there would be an atmosphere of elitism, or that the whole thing would be a chaotic mess that I wouldn't be able to participate in. My concerns turned out to be entirely unfounded.
Perhaps it's the fact that the sort of people who get into mentoring have a great attitude in the first place, or perhaps I've just been too cynical about 'FOSS personalities'... whatever the case, the unconference worked brilliantly. There were no egos driving sessions, no elitism or flaming; it was all just pure, unadulterated geekery that allowed for participation by everyone and somehow ran like clockwork. I learned heaps, met a whole bunch of cool smart people, and I have my usual post-conference 'vibe' that motivates me to spend even more time hacking and contributing to all sorts of stuff.
I also wasn't sure how many projects would be related in any way to the education/GLAM sector, and was pleasantly surprised there too: I met people working with enhancing text with semantic markup (FISE), some folk developing an open source web conferencing tool made to plug into LMSes (Big Blue Button), the Creative Commons people were there, and many more that have just slipped my mind right now.
Of personal interest were sessions around GIS and managing/manipulating geo-spatial data. I've been doing some mashups and webapp work at home around the new TradeMe API (amongst other things) using Google Maps and geocoding (or reverse geocoding) locations, so it was great to learn some more about OpenStreetMap, PostGIS, OpenLayers and similar tools, as well as the challenges facing developers in data storage and interchange. (I also met the other two kiwis attending the summit at this session, oddly enough)
Sessions I attended: (some names are paraphrased since they were just written on a whiteboard)
- Liberate your data!
- Distributed systems and security
- OpenStreetMap routing demo (shortest path) with geofabrik.de
- Geo-spatial data
- Anyone can be a great mentor
- Open Source licensing and copyright issues
- Final session/feedback
As well as attending the unconference sessions, I spent a fair bit of time hacking DSpace with fellow committer Mark Diggory and talking geek with him -- always a good opportunity when most DSpace developers are a whole hemisphere away from me.
I just missed out on the "git for data" session, which was a pity, but I'll take a look at the notes once they're up -- they should be full of goodness.
Post-summit resolutions:
- Get even more involved in GSoC next year and put the lessons I've learned into practice
- Start pronouncing "data" properly (I wince every time I hear myself say "dah-tah")
- Follow up on all the GIS tricks and tools I learned about
- Introduce BigBlueButton to the NZ e-learning community and any university staff who run webinars
- Start using my camera instead of leaving it in my damn backpack all the time
- Blog more (or at least write more)
- Come back to San Francisco some time
Big props to the Google Open Source Programs Office for running GSoC in the first place (especially Carol and Cat) and for organising a brilliant mentor summit, and to all the org mentors/admins who showed up and made the summit what it was.
ps. If you want to catch a glimpse of what was going down while it was going down, as well as some of the aftermath, take a look at the #gsoc #mentorsummit twitter stream
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