I was at the GSoC Mentor Summit this last weekend and it was a fantastic experience! 329 mentors representing 149 organizations got together on the Google campus in Sunnyvale to share ideas, celebrate the summer and eat a lot of food with open source legends. It's a great event and I hope others will mentor and get to go to the summit this coming summer and in the future!
I enjoyed sessions on topics like writing good issues for new contributors, code review, GitHub workflows and more. I was glad to share our experience with setting up a bot to help with Fine-grained permissions for Github issues (self-assign, labels) and of course, the folks who make zulipbot were there too. Overall, it was great to see that a lot of the work we've been doing over the last several months to make ODK more approachable is in line with what other projects do.
I had some great conversations with other organizations about the possibility of doing GSoC projects with joint mentorship. In particular:
- Shogun machine learning library - they've started doing data projects for GSoC where students leverage the library and they are looking for large datasets.
- Public lab empowers community members to research environmental concerns. They use various sensors that could be supported in ODK (similar to ODK Sensors)
- LibraryBox is used for ad-hoc file sharing. It could also be used to receive form submissions and make aggregate data available in an offline context.
I shared @Shobhit_Agarwal's work in a 3-minute lightning talk (slides) and it was very well received. Someone came up to me after and said "sounds like you had an exceptional student" and I couldn't agree more!
Some things I am particularly motivated to follow up on:
- Social/fun/"warm and fuzzy" aspects of the project. How do we collectively keep our energy level high? How do we better recognize community members doing awesome things?
- Leaning more on tools to help with code review. Can we get CircleCI to comment on pull requests that fail to compile? Can we highlight lines that fail checkstyle so they're easier to fix?
- Being more deliberate about reflecting on and improving processes (for example, Reflection: release process for Collect, Briefcase, JavaRosa)
Thank you @Nader for pointing out right-to-left language issues! That is an important thing to keep in mind as we make UI changes. I wonder if we could add some automated testing to make sure we don't forget to verify it?
If anyone else has comments or questions about GSoC or the mentor summit, please ask! Believe it or not, GSoC 2018 has just been officially announced so now's a great time to start thinking of project ideas!