In four hours I'll be on the airplane to San Francisco via Paris.

* erich puts a flower into his hair and starts singing

Saturday there is the "Google Summer of Code mentor summit", where Google invited mentors from the participating organizations to Mountain View to discuss about the Summer of Code program, how it can be improved and what else Google can do for opensource.

We're all very thankful to Google for offering this great program. It's meant as an opportunity to get more students interested into opensource development, and there are many success stories.

Of course the program isn't perfect, and thats what the summit is for, improving it. And I'd really appreciate your feedback, your perception of the GSoC, of the students and the mentors. I've asked for feedback before, but I've received next to nothing so far.

But there is quite a lot to discuss tomorrow. For example, many projects would fit to multiple organizations. I had proposed a SELinux integration project, but most of it would be reuseable by other distributions as well. There was a project which actually meant to integrate one mentoring organizations' project with an other mentoring organization. These could benefit from some "shared mentoring"; at the same time these project could server the prupose of increasing cooperation between organizations.

I myself, for example, know rather little about Fedora, or the state of SELinux in Fedora. Still this is a point (well, if I still had the time to work much on SELinux that is) where I should definitely try to cooperate more with Fedora.

Another proposal that came up and will be discussed is the "Summer of Content". It's not all about code. There is also documentation, graphics, sound, ... Why shouldn't a GSoC student be working on artwork or sound for a summer? The opensource/copyleft community definitely could use some support here, and we have rather few links to artists so far.

So please send me your feedback. I won't be responding to mails for the next like 15+ hours since I'm travelling (maybe even 24h, if I'm busy with real life meetings), but I'm really interested in your ideas!