[Sugar-devel] Conference Report - GSoC Mentor Summit 2019

[Rahul Bothra]

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## About the summit
“The Mentor Summit is an annual unconference and every project
participating in Google Summer of Code 2019 is invited to attend. The
summit was held from October 17 - October 20 '19, in Munich Germany. 332
Mentors from 162 organizations and 42 countries registered for the Mentor
Summit."
Rahul Bothra<rrbothra at gmail.com> and Tarun Kumar Singhal<
tarunsinghaliitd at gmail.com> represented Sugar Labs.

Summit Website: https://sites.google.com/view/gsoc-mentorsummit2019/

## Lightning Talks
"Lightning talks are brief-but-informative fun presentations about your
very best GSoC and/or GCI student outcomes. ... be relatable, interesting,
and focus on the exceptional. Even if all your students were amazing, just
tell us about 1 or 2 (at most) that will be understood by a general
technical audience"
Lightning Talks allowed us to understand what other organizations are
working on. We did not give a lightning talk for Sugar Labs - since the
projects focused more on maintainability than user experience change (at
least those re Sugar).

## Unconference Sessions
Unconference Sessions were organized by attendees to discuss a topic they
were interested in, for an hour. They spanned over two days with ~6
sessions running parallelly. Discussions that could be useful for Sugar
Labs -
 * Outreachy - How the program is evolving now. FWIK, we used to
participate in the past.
 * Open Data - Making different kinds of data open. The discussion did
include a need to have primary level teaching resources open-sourced from
different regions of the world.

## Informal discussions
The summit provided plenty of room for networking sessions. Rahul
interacted with many mentors including those representing webpack, Julia
Computing, Blender, Fedora and many more. Except Fedora, none of them had
heard of Sugar Labs before. Rahul explained "What is Sugar and how did it
evolve", "How Music Blocks evolved and what are its future goals".

## Takeaway
 * The summit is primarily designed to be a fun summit. Since the format of
the summit remains the same every year, we need to identify ways to
leverage this opportunity for promoting our existence.
 * Laptop stickers were an attraction in the summit - we should take them.
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