GSOC Mentor Summit

This summer I mentored for the RTEMS project as part of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) and was invited to attend the mentor summit, which is an unconference with mentors from the projects that participated in GSoC. Bringing together representatives from across open source communities is one of the benefits of the GSoC program: Many shared interests exist among the different organizations that participate in GSoC, and the social interactions and networking opportunities are nice.

I organized a session on open source in space, and I also got a lot out of the sessions on Women and new contributor outreach discussion, Non-Profit Infrastructure for Software Freedom, the Open Source OS Summit, and Aging Project Infrastructure Evaluation. The latter two were technical whereas the session on space focused on raising awareness of the contributions to space science that FOSS makes. The session on contributor outreach gave advice on how to be more inclusive and welcoming to outsiders (including women, who are underrepresented in FOSS communities), and the non-profit session discussed the why and how of making an open source software project benefit from charitable donations.