Oh, Canada!

I'm heading up to Ottawa in about three weeks to speak at BSDCan 2008. The ever gracious Dan Langille suggested that folks attending would be excited to get the inside look at Summer of Code, a topic clearly near and dear to my heart. Rather than just explore the program at a high-level, though, I thought this talk would be a great opportunity to do something I rarely get to do while managing the program: get to know the *BSD projects a bit more closely and understand how they participate in the program, why they participate, how they structure their mentoring processes and how their overall community governance structures shape, mirror or are completely separate from the people infrastructure put in place as part of mentoring the annual crop of new contributors.

I've already had the pleasure of meeting with Jan Schaumann from the NetBSD project, and will be speaking with Justin Sherill of DragonFly BSD fame later this week. Many thanks to Jan for taking an afternoon to help me out while in media res of a coast-to-coast move!!

I have to confess that I'm particularly excited about having dinner with and picking the brain of Dr. Robert Watson from the FreeBSD project. For many reasons, not the least of which is the fact that I never get tired of saying "Dr. Watson." Fortunately I have had the good sense not to do so in front of him up until now, and I have to say I don't intend to vary that strategy. In addition to the joys of vague references to Sherlock Holmes, I'm looking forward to learning more from Robert than I already did from his excellent talk How the FreeBSD Project Works. Should be lots of fun, informative and a great opportunity for me to show off my favorite Thai place.

Should you find yourself at BSDCan or in and around Ottawa during the conference, stop by to say hello. Be forewarned that I remain deeply skeptical of poutine, but am a big fan of maple syrup. Well, truthfully I'm not, but as a big fan of breakfast it's hard to stay away from one of its star players. Waffles anyone?