On October 24, 2009, the geek factor at the Googleplex in Mountain View, California, jumped even higher as representatives from 124 GSOC projects swarmed in for the weekend 2009 GSOC Mentor Summit.

Steve Fisher and I were lucky enough to represent your favorite CMS. It was a wonderful opportunity to meet people from so many other FOSS projects and enjoy the geek-gadget-grab bag that is the Googleplex.

Three giant flat-screen panels display a joy-stick-controlled Google Earth as you enter. The effect is like riding in a helicopter over anywhere on the planet. Turn around to see a wall-size display of words that people from around the world are searching as you watch. Another wall shows a world map with dots representing how many people are online from different areas.

Despite all of the gadgets, the real draw for me was the opportunity to meet, talk to, and learn from the other attendees. The take-away items came in two flavors, general and specific.

On the general side, it was interesting to learn about a wide range of projects, small to large, new to well established, obscure to well known. Despite this range, there seemed to be a lot of things we have in common. Every project seems interested in increasing participation from their communities and wished they had more active contributors.

Also, we all seem to share a strong belief in the open-source process and its importance in the software world, the world in general, and our own lives.

On the specific side, I was able to compare notes with people from other projects and learned some interesting things. Here is a sample:

• Drupal and WordPress both have IRC channels for development questions and support. They also both have "call-home" features in their software that allow the project to collect anonymous statistics about the number of sites deployed and specific features or parameters that are used.

• The Apache project does all of their official discussion and decision making on their public mailing lists.

• The GHOP program, which is targeted toward high-school students, has been a major source of recruiting committers for a number of projects.

• Security experts come from a different planet, where they worry about things like zero-day issues, entropy, PGP keys and code hardening. (Does code work better if you wait until it hardens?)

All in all, it was a frantic, fun, and valuable experience. Thank you, Google, for the Summer of Code program and for a fantastic summit.