In a general sense, configuration management (CM) is a systems engineering approach for systematically managing complexity to guarantee performance. My job this summer will be applying this approach to FreeCAD.
Because mine will be the only project, we will be doing something a bit different for the mentorship and community activity/engagement part of things. However I'll wait for Yorik to chime in and explain more.
Needless to say, because of the broad nature of this project the scope will be largely community driven. I have a shortlist of specific goals and three broadly general ones. In my opinion, attacking the problem of less-than-perfect Debian GNU/Linux and Windows 7/10 development experiences will suffice to make headway on the CM problem. The Debian improvements will move downstream for developers and users alike in distros like Ubuntu and Linux Mint. If I'm lucky, they will even make it to future low-cost ARM devices like the next Raspberry Pi (think of the increase in use FreeCAD could gain there!) Improving things on Windows, largely by furthering loooo's work on conda, will make it easier for devs on Windows to contribute and to reach the largest share of users out there. Finally, Buildbot, a cross-platform build automation solution used by many projects, such as Chromium and Blender, has for too long been a future goal for FreeCAD. I want to get this working on at least Linux and Windows workers so we can, e.g. release more test builds and have improved continuous integration.
And finally, I just wanted to say I look forward to everyone's contributions to this thread. Even though it's a summer of code I posted it on Open Discussion instead of the Developer's Corner because this especially involves everyone.