Google Summer of Code problems, GCDS

GSoC and GNOME

Today David J.Daniel G. Siegel and me gave a talk at GCDS named “Google Summer of Code & Highly Open Participation Contest: How successful is GNOME?”.
The slides are available here (PDF, 5.2MB).

The discussion after our talk basically boiled down to two issues:

• How to keep more of the students in our community after GSoC
• How to integrate more of the code that was written for GSoC

Some of the feedback I got after the talk and at the Nokia party in the evening:

• Tobi said that more feedback on the weekly GSoC reports written by the students could be helpful to strengthen the feeling that there is interest in their work.
• In case that the GSoC mentor is not also the module maintainer Cosimo proposed that an OK by the affected module maintainer should be required first to make sure that the GSoC code will be welcome (sometimes maintainers have other ideas and concepts about architecture or the path their project should take).
• GSoC code is not integrated into the next GNOME version because of the GNOME release schedule. Hence it takes at least 9 months until the results are included in a stable release.
  There’s no solution to this as both Google and GNOME do not intend to change their schedules.
• Diego said that there should also be an email to the corresponding project mailinglist/maintainer and/or a blog post by the mentor of the student that introduces the student.
• Björn said that integrating people into our community might be improved by also using social networks like Facebook.

General GCDS comments

• It’s hot and sweaty and I got a slight sunburn. Expected though. I’m good in getting them.
• Makes me very happy to meet with so many friends, colleagues and people again for talking about code, projects, real life. Grateful to be part of this great open source community (which means GNOME, KDE and freedesktop.org here).
• The venue has a terrace right to the sea – the smell is beautiful and yesterday we went swimming in the Atlantic ocean around midnight. Priceless.
• Maemo Harmattan switching from GTK+ to Qt by default. After talking to several people I am not yet sure what to think about it.
• Richard Stallman’s keynote. I must admit that I am biased as I don’t share his point of view on C# and parts of his ideology. So to me this was somewhere between a leader talking to his sect and a children’s birthday (I missed playing “Hit the Pot” after singing the Free Software song together). Potentially misogynistic “jokes” (Lefty described it quite well) made it even worse. In doubt I hope that it was not his intention. I was a bit reminded of Michael Jackson – awesome artist and great work in the past but let’s forget about the last years please.
• GNOME 3 status talk tomorrow trying to cover most of the recent activities and plans. Let’s get the big picture to see where we are.

Microblogging

Henri tricked me at the GCDS Welcoming Party into promising him that I am going to start using Qaiku as I am the only person left using the maemo.org wiki for his activity reports. I still don’t feel comfortable with microblogging. I have a Twitter account (just needed it for reproducing some bugs on the N810) but I do not use it at all (and never intended) as the signal vs. noise ratio seems way too high (also see Stormy’s post about that and other issues with microblogging). I admit that it can be useful though. Time will tell.