Gleanings from the GSoC Mentor Summit

[Christoph Otto]

Howdy,

This weekend, dukeleto++ and I had the privilege of attending the GSoC
Mentor Summit.  The summit is a participant-run unconference for mentors
of GSoC projects, by the hackers for the hackers, at Google's offices
and on their dime.  Both of duke and I picked up a treasure trove of
ideas and made some good connections with OSS hackers who we wouldn't
usually get to hang out with.  I tried to take notes at all the sessions
I attended and have boiled them down to a delicious list of action
items.  There's some great stuff in the list that I hope will help make
Parrot a better project and community, but it's considerably more than I
can handle all by my lonesome.  Below is a summary list of the tasks I
came up with.

* Jenkins -  it's Java, but it's also awesome.  We need better CI and
  many projects are using Jenkins to some very cool (and very lazy)
  automated testing.  This would also help us make better use of the GCC
  compile farm and OSUOSL's Supercell.
* pdf.js apparently has a pretty cool bot.   Someone outght to see if
  there's anything worth stealing and report back to parrot-dev.
* dddash.ep.io is a spiffy and simple graphical display of developer
  metrics.  This might be fun to put on a subdomain of parrot.org.
* docs owner - our docs have always been something of a mess.  If
  someone's interested, we could benefit from having a hacker who owns
  our documentation and makes it his/her business to make our docs
  shine.  This is a substantial commitment.
* gsoc/gci analysis - We need to know how gsoc and gci are helping
  Parrot, what our goals are and if we're meeting them.  We need
  someone to lead this effort and to do some reporting about how gsoc
  has gone in the past and where we can improve.  Note that Google
  likes orgs that do this because it shows that we're concerned about
  long-term results.

I'll be going through them in more detail at #parrotsketch this Tuesday.
If anything on the list looks interesting to any of you, please drop by
and we'll see about putting you to work.  Alternately, just jump right
in!  It's almost always better to ask for forgiveness than permission
when hacking on Parrot.*  dukeleto++ has already started seriously
looking at Jenkins and I've got a couple of blog posts to write and toys
to experiment with.

All this may be more than we can handle during one #ps, but I hope we
can find people to work on a couple of these items.  Be thinking about
what you'd like to do and I'll see you at #ps,

Christoph



*Except where it's not.