Hi,
Here is a report on the recent GSoC Mentor's Summit:
Four Inkscape developers were at the 2014 GSoC Mentor's Summit in San Jose: Johan Engelen, Krzysztof Kosiński, Tavmjong Bah, and Joakim Verona. Johan and Krzysztof were Inkscape's official delegates, Tav won the special 10 Year Reunion lottery, and Joakim was there representing the GNU Project.
The first day started out with a bonding session... a visit to the Great America theme park which Google had rented out. There is nothing like sharing a death defying roller coaster ride to get to know your fellow Inkscaper. The afternoon was free and we held an informal Inkscape session. Johan worked with Joakim on setting up an automated testing system using Jenkins. It turns out that this is what Joakim does for his day job so it was very helpful to have him there. Krzysztof reviewed Tav's preparations for the SVG Working Group meeting that Tav was attending the following week in Santa Clara.
The next two days of the "un-conference" were full of short informal meetings on various topics of interest to the open-source community. Here are a notes on the more memorable sessions (with help from Johan):
FLOSS Funding -------------
There was a very interesting session on FLOSS funding.
* Paid development
A point that was repeated many times was that the introduction of paid development must be done in an open and transparent manner to avoid alienating contributors. One suggested place to spend money is on code reviews. Paying a small amount rewards long-term contributors (i.e. reviewers) while encouraging reviews to be done in a timely manner thus encouraging future contributions. Quality insurance is another place where paid contributions can be useful. It was noted that paid development can be helpful to those on "2nd shift" where the "1st shift" maybe taking care of kids.
Johan observed that most of the talk was about "sustained funding" (where the goal is having full time developers) vs. "beer money" (where the money helps subsidize some of the time developers invest). He's a little leery of getting into the former type of funding.
One possible place for funding might be grants, perhaps in a university setting where money could pay for a PhD/postdoc to work on improving Inkscape for a particular purpose.
* Cookie licking
Not only limited to paid development:
An example of a problem one can encounter is the "Cookie Licking Pattern"[1] where someone takes a cookie (project) and licks it to claim the project as their own. This discourages others from taking up the project - which may not be a problem if the "licker" delivers on the project in a timely matter. But if the "licker" doesn't, then project doesn't get done as nobody else will touch it. An additional problem can occur if the "licker" puts the cookie back without telling anyone and someone else picks up the cookie. A conflict in "ownership" can occur. This can be be avoided by having well defined policy about project ownership.
Community Building ------------------
Another session focused on community building. Drupal seems to be very successful at this. "Web chick"[2] reported (if my ears didn't lie to me) that Drupal has 30,000 contributors! One only needs to look at their web site to see the effort they take in building community[3], especially in mentoring new contributors.[4]
Good community management starts with tracking your contributors (emails, commits, etc.) overtime to see if you are improving or not.
Post times when regulars can be found on IRC. ( Just saying "join us on IRC" can be demotivating if no-one is in channel. "join us on IRC, many of us are there at 1:23 UTC" is better.)
Our community is friendly, and we should try to be even more friendly! E.g., keep the mail list friendly and mannered.
There is a book available for free download called "The Art of Community".[5]
FLOSS Audio/Visual ------------------
There was a session focusing on FLOSS audio/visual projects.
* Press releases
Don't let coders write the press release! Coders tend to focus on bugs and not on how awesome the software really is. Be careful with what you say. The press has a tendency to parrot the press release.
* Stickers/Advertising
Some projects could benefit from providing stickers... think of the publicity from having a sticker on a DJ's setup advertising a FLOSS DJ project. Inkscape might try to get "Supported by Inkscape" on Wacom boxes. (Aside: Maybe seek support from Wacom to improve support for tablets.)
* Missing Assets (non-coder contributions)
One area where non-coders can help is in providing missing assets. This was brought up in the context of getting more sound samples for digital sound libraries. In the Inkscape context it could be things like getting more seamless patterns in our pattern library.
Overall, it was a very good meeting.
[1] http://communitymgt.wikia.com/wiki/Cookie_Licking [2] https://www.drupal.org/u/webchick [3] https://www.drupal.org/community [4] https://www.drupal.org/core-office-hours [5] www.artofcommunityonline.org/2009/09/18/the-art-of-community-now-available-for-free-download