Meet Your Mentors: Women in Open Source

Prompted by an off-hand remark during an IRC conversation about how many women were mentoring for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest, we decided it would be great to chat with several of our women mentors and find out more about how GHOP is going for their communities. During our latest podcast, you'll hear from:

• Noirin Plunkett from the Apache Software Foundation
  
• Addison Berry and Angela Byron from Drupal
• Amy Stephen and Elin Waring from Joomla!
  

You'll likely recognize several of these names as mentors for Summer of Code. Among the many topics we covered, the phenomenal contributions of our GHOP contestants made up the better part of our conversation. You'll also hear more about best practices for encouraging women to participate in open source and some thoughts on women and community management.

Many thanks to Addison, Amy, Angela, Elin and Noirin for joining us.

You can download the podcast in mp3 or ogg formats. Alternatively, you can subscribe to it.

We always love to hear from you, so if you have thoughts on the podcast or tips for helping communities be most welcoming to female contributors, post a comment and share your thoughts with us.

Summer of Coders at Google: Angela Byron

Following on from last week's Mentor Summit, we were fortunate enough to have two guests from the Drupal project visit us for a tech talk. Angela Byron, Summer of Coder extraordinaire, joined us along with her co-conspirator Geoff Butterfield, for a presentation on Implementing Drupal. Check out the video to learn more from Angie about the CMS' architecture and deploying Drupal sites. Added bonus, Geoff treats us to a taste of Drupal in action through a case study of edutopia.org, the website of the George Lucas Educational Foundation, where Geoff works as the foundation's Senior Technical Producer.

Many thanks to Angie and Geoff for joining us, and to Cat Allman from our Open Source Programs Office for hosting their talk!

Oregon State University Open Source Lab

Our friends at OSUOSL have posted a write up on their Summer of Code experience this year. Some highlights:

• Darko Ilic, who joined us in 2005 working with Fedora on Kadischi, rolled up his sleeves this year to help OSUOSL's team working on the media player and encoder for the XO laptop.
• Seth Lemons worked on security and integration enhancements for cross-platform browsing on kiosks, built atop the Mozilla Gecko engine.
• Another returning student, Robert Wohleb, teamed up with Silas Snider to add support for Google Apps to Drupal, including single sign-on and provisioning of hosted domain accounts.

Check out OSUOSL's round up for more details, as well as some excellent advice for prospective Summer of Code participants.

For Your Weekend Listening Pleasure

We've now got all of our Summer of Code podcasts available in ogg format!

For all those of you preparing for final evaluations on Monday, take a break and enjoy the dulcet tones of these audio offerings from your fellow mentors and students.

You can directly download the podcasts from each link.

• Episode 1 - Drupal
• Episode 2 - The Umit Project
• Episode 3 - The Mono Project
• Episode 4 - Joomla!
• Episode 5 - OpenMRS
• Episode 6 - Desmond Elliott
• Epsiode 7 - Pawel Solyga
• Episode 8 - Adium
• Episode 9 - Ed Baskerville
• Episode 10 - The Toronto Connection
• Episode 11 - Fyodor Vaskovich

Keep your eye out for our next episode, featuring Philippe Ombredanne, mentor and organization administrator for the Eclipse project.

We'll be releasing ogg and mp3 formats concurrently for all future editions.

Enjoy the shows!

Summer of Coders at Google: Desmond Elliott

You've probably already heard about all the cool stuff you can do if you visit our Mountain View, California USA Headquarters: help yourself to a delicious free lunch, check out our replica of SpaceShipOne or take a look at our corporate solar panel installation. If you're a Summer of Coder, though, you're likely to be talked into a recording a podcast.

Desmond Elliott visited a few weeks ago and I got to catch up with him about his work on the Camino project for SoC 2006 and his plans for working with OpenMRS this year. Desmond also has the usual sage advice for would-be Summer of Code students and some thoughts on our first SoC podcast with Angie Byron from the Drupal project.


You can directly download the podcast or subscribe to the podcast.

Enjoy the show!

Summer Sweetness x 2

Sure, getting accepted into Summer of Code is cool. Hammering on that keyboard until those last few lines of code are checked in, even cooler. Gaining committer status with your project, truly sweet. IMHO, though, the coolest thing about participating in Summer of Code is the chance to get deeply involved with your project community, so much so that you end up on the other side of the table, mentoring students for your project. After all, who knows the trials and tribulations of SoCer student life better than a former participant?

Our first Summer of Code podcast features one such SoCer student turned mentor, Angie Byron with the Drupal project. In addition to hearing more about her experiences as an SoCer, I also had a chance to catch up with her about her presentation on Women in floss at the recent Flourish conference. She also has some great suggestions for this year's students.

We're really excited to be bringing the podcast to the community, and we're even more excited to hear what you think. Leave a comment about the podcast and tell us what you'd like to see in future editions.

You can directly download the first episode, or you can subscribe to the podcast.

Enjoy the show!

What Happens Now?

The acceptance stir has stilled and #summer-discuss on Slashnet is largely quiet. If you're an accepted student or brand new mentor, you're probably wondering "What happens now?"

This year, we've built nearly two extra months into the program time line to give students time to integrate with their communities and get up to speed before starting their coding projects. Now is the perfect time to introduce your students to your project in depth. Here are some tips with you to help you get started.

Mentors and organization administrators, take this time to reach out to your accepted students: welcome them to the project and make sure they know who their mentor and, if applicable, back up mentor will be. Let them know where they can take questions if they can't reach their mentor. Encourage them to talk amongst themselves to build camaraderie and mutual inspiration.

Students, if you haven't already, sign up for your project's development mailing lists and hang out in your organization's forums or IRC channel. Start learning more about the way social interactions occur between its developers. If you take the time to learn now how the members of your organization communicate, you'll be able to tell the difference between idle banter and developers concentrating on solving a serious problem. Certainly helps you to not step in with a question at an inopportune time.

In addition, now is a great time to get started on all the administrivia needed to begin contributing to the project. Do you need to get a CVS account? Rethink your project plan? Get access to other project resources so you can get started? Your mentor will be able to help you with these things.

New mentors, if you're not sure of all the points to cover with your students, I'd check out Robert Douglass' post. It contains most of the salient points sent in Drupal's introductory email to their 2007 students. If you haven't already taken the time to send your students a message with this type of information, this weekend is a fine time to do it.

On the Google side, we're working on getting the mailing lists and blog planet together. We're looking forward to spending another year with some of you and starting a new one with many of you. Google Summer of Code 2007 is on!