Tag Archives: Events

Google Cloud Platform: your Next home in the cloud

By Brian Stevens, Vice President, Cloud Platforms

San Francisco — Today at Google Cloud Next ‘17, we’re thrilled to announce new Google Cloud Platform (GCP) products, technologies and services that will help you imagine, build and run the next generation of cloud applications on our platform.

Bring your code to App Engine, we’ll handle the rest

In 2008, we launched Google App Engine, a pioneering serverless runtime environment that lets developers build web apps, APIs and mobile backends at Google-scale and speed. For nearly 10 years, some of the most innovative companies built applications that serve their users all over the world on top of App Engine. Today, we’re excited to announce into general availability a major expansion of App Engine centered around openness and developer choice that keeps App Engine’s original promise to developers: bring your code, we’ll handle the rest.

App Engine now supports Node.js, Ruby, Java 8, Python 2.7 or 3.5, Go 1.8, plus PHP 7.1 and .NET Core, both in beta, all backed by App Engine’s 99.95% SLA. Our managed runtimes make it easy to start with your favorite languages and use the open source libraries and packages of your choice. Need something different than what’s out of the box? Break the glass and go beyond our managed runtimes by supplying your own Docker container, which makes it simple to run any language, library or framework on App Engine.

The future of cloud is open: take your app to-go by having App Engine generate a Docker container containing your app and deploy it to any container-based environment, on or off GCP. App Engine gives developers an open platform while still providing a fully managed environment where developers focus only on code and on their users.


Cloud Functions public beta at your service

Up one level from fully managed applications, we’re launching Google Cloud Functions into public beta. Cloud Functions is a completely serverless environment to build and connect cloud services without having to manage infrastructure. It’s the smallest unit of compute offered by GCP and is able to spin up a single function and spin it back down instantly. Because of this, billing occurs only while the function is executing, metered to the nearest one hundred milliseconds.

Cloud Functions is a great way to build lightweight backends, and to extend the functionality of existing services. For example, Cloud Functions can respond to file changes in Google Cloud Storage or incoming Google Cloud Pub/Sub messages, perform lightweight data processing/ETL jobs or provide a layer of logic to respond to webhooks emitted by any event on the internet. Developers can securely invoke Cloud Functions directly over HTTP right out of the box without the need for any add-on services.

Cloud Functions is also a great option for mobile developers using Firebase, allowing them to build backends integrated with the Firebase platform. Cloud Functions for Firebase handles events emitted from the Firebase Realtime Database, Firebase Authentication and Firebase Analytics.

Growing the Google BigQuery universe: introducing BigQuery Data Transfer Service

Since our earliest days, our customers turned to Google to promote their advertising messages around the world, at a scale that was previously unimaginable. Today, those same customers want to use BigQuery, our powerful data analytics service, to better understand how users interact with those campaigns. With that, we’ve developed deeper integration between broader Google and GCP with the public beta of the BigQuery Data Transfer Service, which automates data movement from select Google applications directly into BigQuery. With BigQuery Data Transfer Service, marketing and business analysts can easily export data from Adwords, DoubleClick and YouTube directly into BigQuery, making it available for immediate analysis and visualization using the extensive set of tools in the BigQuery ecosystem.

Slashing data preparation time with Google Cloud Dataprep

In fact, our goal is to make it easy to import data into BigQuery, while keeping it secure. Google Cloud Dataprep is a new serverless browser-based service that can dramatically cut the time it takes to prepare data for analysis, which represents about 80% of the work that data scientists do. It intelligently connects to your data source, identifies data types, identifies anomalies and suggests data transformations. Data scientists can then visualize their data schemas until they're happy with the proposed data transformation. Dataprep then creates a data pipeline in Google Cloud Dataflow, cleans the data and exports it to BigQuery or other destinations. In other words, you can now prepare structured and unstructured data for analysis with clicks, not code. For more information on Dataprep, apply to be part of the private beta. Also, you’ll find more news about our latest database and data and analytics capabilities here and here.

Hello, (more) world

Not only are we working hard on bringing you new products and capabilities, but we want your users to access them quickly and securely — wherever they may be. That’s why we’re announcing three new Google Cloud Platform regions: California, Montreal and the Netherlands. These will bring the total number of Google Cloud regions up from six today, to more than 17 locations in the future. These new regions will deliver lower latency for customers in adjacent geographic areas, increased scalability and more disaster recovery options. Like other Google Cloud regions, the new regions will feature a minimum of three zones, benefit from Google’s global, private fibre network and offer a complement of GCP services.

Supercharging our infrastructure . . .

Customers run demanding workloads on GCP, and we're constantly striving to improve the performance of our VMs. For instance, we were honored to be the first public cloud provider to run Intel Skylake, a custom Xeon chip that delivers significant enhancements for compute-heavy workloads and a larger range of VM memory and CPU options.

We’re also doubling the number of vCPUs you can run in an instance from 32 to 64 and now offering up to 416GB of memory, which customers have asked us for as they move large enterprise applications to Google Cloud. Meanwhile, we recently began offering GPUs, which provide substantial performance improvements to parallel workloads like training machine learning models.

To continually unlock new energy sources, Schlumberger collects large quantities of data to build detailed subsurface earth models based on acoustic measurements, and GCP compute infrastructure has the unique characteristics that match Schlumberger's needs to turn this data into insights. High performance scientific computing is integral to its business, so GCP's flexibility is critical.

Schlumberger can mix and match GPUs and CPUs and dynamically create different shapes and types of virtual machines, choosing memory and storage options on demand.

"We are now leveraging the strengths offered by cloud computation stacks to bring our data processing to the next level." — Ashok Belani, Executive Vice President Technology, Schlumberger

. . . without supercharging our prices

We aim to keep costs low. Today we announced Committed Use Discounts that provide up to 57% off the list price on Google Compute Engine, in exchange for a one or three year purchase commitment. Committed Use Discounts are based on the total amount of CPU and RAM you purchase, and give you the flexibility to use different instance and machine types; they apply automatically, even if you change instance types (or size). There are no upfront costs with Committed Use Discounts, and they are billed monthly. What’s more, we automatically apply Sustained Use Discounts to any additional usage above a commitment.

We're also dropping prices for Compute Engine. The specific cuts vary by region. Customers in the United States will see a 5% price drop; customers in Europe will see a 4.9% drop and customers using our Tokyo region an 8% drop.

Then there’s our improved Free Tier. First, we’ve extended the free trial from 60 days to 12 months, allowing you to use your $300 credit across all GCP services and APIs, at your own pace and on your own schedule. Second, we’re introducing new Always Free products — non-expiring usage limits that you can use to test and develop applications at no cost. New additions include Compute Engine, Cloud Pub/Sub, Google Cloud Storage and Cloud Functions, bringing the number of Always Free products up to 15, and broadening the horizons for developers getting started on GCP. Visit the Google Cloud Platform Free Tier page today for further details, terms, eligibility and to sign up.

We'll be diving into all of these product announcements in much more detail in the coming days, so stay tuned!

Join us at Next, right now

By Alex Barrett, Editor, Google Cloud Platform blog

If you’re reading this blog post, stop right now and head over to the livestream of the Google Cloud Next '17 keynote, featuring Diane Greene, Senior Vice President of Google Cloud; Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google; Eric Schmidt, Chairman of Alphabet and Fei-Fei Li, Chief Scientist for Google Cloud Machine Learning. We promise you’ll be glad you did.
After this morning’s keynote ends, we’ll kick off over 200 breakout sessions, where Googlers, customers and partners will discuss new, efficient and exciting ways of using Google Cloud technologies, including Google Cloud Platform (GCP), G Suite, Maps APIs and mobile.

If you’re at the show, be sure to check out the show floor and Sandbox, an interactive show-floor experience that showcases the amazing things you can build with Google Cloud technology.
And stay tuned to this channel for breaking news and announcements. Until then, enjoy the show!

By maintainers, for maintainers: Wontfix_Cabal

The Google Open Source Programs Office likes to highlight events we support, organize, or speak at. In this case, Google’s own Jess Frazelle was responsible for running a unique event for open source maintainers.

This year I helped organize the first inaugural Wontfix_Cabal. The conference was organized by open source software maintainers for open source software maintainers. Our initial concept was an unconference where attendees could discuss topics candidly with their peers from other open source communities.

The idea for the event stemmed from the response to a blog post I published about closing pull requests. The response was overwhelming, with many maintainers commiserating and sharing lessons they had learned. It seemed like we could all learn a lot from our peers in other projects -- if we had the space to do so -- and it was clear that people needed a place to vent.

Major thanks to Katrina Owen and Brandon Keepers from GitHub who jumped right in and provided the venue we needed to make this happen. Without their support this would’ve never become a reality!

It was an excellent first event and the topics discussed were wide ranging, including:
  • How to deal with unmaintained projects
  • Collecting metrics to judge project health
  • Helping newcomers
  • Dealing with backlogs
  • Coping with, and minimizing, toxic behavior in our communities


The discussion around helping newcomers focused on creating communities with welcoming and productive cultures right from the start. I was fascinated to learn that some projects pre-fill issues before going public so as to set the tone for the future of the project. Another good practice is clearly defining how one becomes a maintainer or gets commit access. There should be clear rules in place so people know what they have to do to succeed.

Another discussion I really liked focused on “saying no.” Close fast and close early was a key takeaway. There’s no sense in letting a contribution sit waiting when you know it will never be accepted. Multiple projects found that having a bot give the hard news was always better than having the maintainer do it. This way it is not personal, just a regular part of the process.

One theme seen in multiple sessions: “Being kind is not the same as being nice.” The distinction here is that being nice comes from a place of fear and leads people to bend over backwards just to please. Being kind comes from a place of strength, from doing the right thing.

Summaries of many of the discussions have been added to the GitHub repo if you would like to read more.

After the event concluded many maintainers got right to work, putting what they had learned into practice. For instance, Rust got help from the Google open source fuzzing team.


Our goal was to put together a community of maintainers that could support and learn from each other. When I saw Linux kernel maintainers talking to people who work on Node and JavaScript, I knew we had achieved that goal. Laura Abbott, one of those kernel developers, wrote a blog post about the experience.

Not only was the event useful, it was also a lot of fun. Meeting maintainers, people who care a great deal about open source software, from such a diverse group of projects was great. Overall, I think our initial run was a success! Follow us on Twitter to find out about future events.

By Jess Frazelle, Software Engineer

A community view: what’s top of mind at Google Cloud Next ’17

By Jo Maitland, Blogs and Social Media Lead, Google Cloud

Our annual ritual of inviting thousands of customers, partners, developers, IT pros, industry analysts and press to join us for three days of learning about Google Cloud has arrived. This week we'll open the doors to Google Cloud Next '17, and I can tell you, you're in for a tremendous show.

But instead of sharing what I’m excited about, here's a sampling of opinion from people in the community who are coming to Next.

Amanda Folson, Develooper Advocate and Community Lead, GitLab

"The market is moving so fast that keeping tabs on it is tough when there’s so much going on. Google popped up overnight and is doing some very innovative work. As far as sessions go, I want to hear what Vint Cerf and Marc Andreessen have to say in their fireside chat on the past and future of enterprise computing. They’ve had a little bit to do with the internet! My company’s focused on orchestration and managing the lifecycle of code, so I’ll be attending sessions on Kubernetes, Docker and anything on DevOps. It’s where everything is headed."
Krish Subramanian, SVP of Products and Strategy, CloudMunch

"I’m interested in finding out about enterprise companies adopting Google Cloud as well as the traction Google is seeing for machine learning. I want to see what’s in store to attract more devs to the service. Another trend I’m watching closely is serverless — I’ll be interested to learn how Google Cloud Functions stacks up against AWS Lambda."
David Mytton, Founder and CEO, Server Density

"We’ve been gradually migrating our systems over to GCP from IBM Softlayer. We are big advocates of handing off management of infrastructure to Google’s cloud services instead of wrangling it ourselves. We recently migrated our time series database to Google Cloud Bigtable. I’ll be giving a talk on this migration on March 8. I’m looking forward to meeting other GCP customers and learning about new products. Providing feedback one to one with specific Google teams is also really valuable."
Alex Williams, Founder and Editor-in-chief, The New Stack

"I am looking forward to learning more about how how Google views the next generation of data centers in the context of software development across multiple cloud infrastructures . . . be they customer infrastructures or those offered by competitors. . . We are curious about the evolution of APIs as they become more important for companies as a way to reach more third-party developers. This larger story about APIs is particularly pertinent when considering new "serverless" style architectures. It's in this realm that we see the intersection of machine learning and connected systems evolving. We'll be looking for proof points of this evolution when speaking with Google developers and engineers as well as customers and conference attendees. I am also hoping to get a deeper understanding of the way Google views open source ecosystems."
Simone Brunozzi, CTO, MosaixSoft

"1) Kubernetes vs. everything else
2) Machine Learning tools"


Weird. Nobody mentioned the open bar and catching up with old friends!

See you there, or on the livestream!

Developer Advocates offer up their favorite Google Cloud NEXT 17 sessions

By Sam Ramji, Vice President of Product Management, Compute and Developer Services

Here at Google Cloud, we employ a small army of developer advocates, DAs for short, who are out on the front lines at conferences, at customer premise, or on social media, explaining our technologies and communicating back to people like me and our product teams about your needs as a member of a development community.

DAs take the responsibility of advocating for developers seriously, and have spent time poring over the extensive Google Cloud Next '17 session catalog, bookmarking the talks that will benefit you. To wit:
  • If you’re a developer working in Ruby, you know to turn to Aja Hammerly for all things Ruby/Google Cloud Platform (GCP)-related. Aja’s top pick for Rubyists at Next is Google Cloud Platform < 3 Ruby with Google Developer Program Engineer Remi Taylor, but there are other noteworthy mentions on her personal blog.
  • Mete Atamel is your go-to DA for all things Windows on GCP. Selfishly, his top Next session is his own about running ASP.NET apps on GCP, but he has plenty more suggestions for you to choose from. 
  • Groovy nut Guillaume Laforge is going to be one busy guy at Next, jumping from between sessions about PaaS, serverless and containers, to name a few. Here’s his full list of his must-see sessions. 
  • If you’re a game developer, let Mark Mandel be your guide. Besides co-presenting with Rob Whitehead, CTO of Improbable, Mark has bookmarked sessions about location-based gaming, using GPUs and game analytics. Mosy on over to his personal blog for the full list.
  • In the past year, Google Apps Script has opened the door to building amazing customizations for G Suite, our communication and collaboration platform. In this G Suite Developers blog post, Wesley Chun walks you through some of the cool Apps Script sessions, as well as sessions about App Maker and some nifty G Suite APIs. 
  • Want to attend sessions that teach you about our machine learning services? That’s where you’ll find our hands-on ML expert Sara Robinson, who in addition to recommending her favorite Next sessions, also examines her talk from last year’s event using Cloud Natural Language API. 
For my part, I’m really looking forward to Day 3, which we’re modeling after my favorite open source conferences thanks to Sarah Novotny’s leadership. We’ll have a carefully assembled set of open talks on Kubernetes, TensorFlow and Apache Beam that cover the technologies, how to contribute, the ecosystems around them and small group discussions with the developers. For a full list of keynotes, bootcamps and breakout sessions, check out the schedule and reserve your spot.

And the winners of the Google Play Indie Games Contest in Europe are…

Posted by Matteo Vallone, Google Play Games Business Development


Today, at Saatchi Gallery in London, we hosted the final event of the first Google Play Indie Games Contest in Europe. The 20 finalists, selected from nearly 1000 submissions, came from 12 countries to showcase their games to an excited room of gamers, industry experts and press. Selected based on the votes of the attendees and the Google Play team, the Top 10 pitched in front of a jury of industry experts who chose the top winners.


Stay tuned for more pictures and a video of the event.

Without further ado, join us in congratulating the winners!

Winner & Unity prize winner:

Reigns, by Nerial, from the United Kingdom

You are the King. For each decision, you only have two choices. Survive the exercise of power and the craziness of your advisors... as long as you can.

 Runners up:
The Battle of Polytopia, by Midjiwan AB, from Sweden

A turn based strategic adventure. It's a game about ruling the world, fighting evil AI tribes, discovering new lands and mastering new technologies.
Causality, by Loju, from the United Kingdom

A puzzle about manipulating time, altering the sequence of events and changing the outcome of each level to help a group of astronauts find a route to safety.


The other top games selected by the event attendees and the Google Play team are:


Blind Drive, by Lo-Fi People, from Israel

You're driving blindfolded as a mysterious voice gives you suicidal commands on the phone. Survive on-rushing vehicles using only your hearing to guide you.
Gladiabots, by GFX47, from France

A competitive tactical game in which you design the AI of your robot squad. Use your own strategy, refine it online and fight for the top of the leaderboard.
Happy Hop: Kawaii Jump, by Platonic Games, from Spain

This isn't just an original one-tap endless hopper, it's also the cutest one. Ever wondered what's in the end of the rainbow? That would be Happy Hop.
Lost in Harmony, by Digixart Entertainment, from France

Experience music in a new way with the combination of rhythmic tapping and choreographic runner to go through two memorable journeys with Kaito and M.I.R.A.I.
Paper Wings, by Fil Games, from Turkey

A fast-paced arcade game which puts you in control of an origami bird. Avoid the hazards and collect the falling coins to keep your paper bird alive.
Pinout, by Mediocre, from Sweden

A breathtaking pinball arcade experience: race against time in a continuous journey through this canyon of pulsating lights and throbbing retro wave beats.
Rusty Lake: Roots, by Rusty Lake, from Netherlands

James Vanderboom's life drastically changes when he plants a special seed in the garden. Expand your bloodline by unlocking portraits in the tree of life.
Check out the prizes
The prizes of this contest were designed to help the winners showcase their art and grow their business on Android and Google Play, including:
  • YouTube influencer campaigns worth up to 100,000 EUR
  • Premium placements on Google Play
  • Tickets to Google I/O 2017 and other top industry events
  • Promotions on our channels
  • Special prizes for the best Unity game
  • And more!
What’s next?
The week is not over just yet for Indie games developers. Tomorrow we are hosting the Indie Games Workshop for all indie games developers from across EMEA in the new Google office in Kings Cross.

 It’s been really inspiring to see the enthusiasm around this inaugural edition, and the quality and creativity of the indie games developed across the eligible European countries. We are looking forward to bringing a new edition of the contest to you in late 2017.

Many thanks again to everyone who entered the contest. We can’t wait to see the amazing games that you will create this year to delight Android users.

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5 must-see security sessions at Google Cloud Next ’17

By David B. Cross, Cloud Security Engineering Director

So many sessions, so little time. Google Cloud Next '17, taking place next month, features over 200 breakout sessions; many geared directly at security professionals. If you only have time on your schedule for a few security breakouts, here are the ones you can’t afford to miss.

For a foundation in how we help secure Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — and for a peek at the various security threats Google grapples with day in and day out — check out “Lessons learned from securing both Google and Google Cloud customers.” Here, Andy Chang, Google Senior Product Manager, will discuss the various layers of Google security, its security team and what it’s learned from preventing, detecting and responding to cyber attacks over the years.

Now that you better understand our security features, learn how to attach your on-prem environment to Google Cloud via Virtual Private Cloud. In “How to create a secure, private environment in the cloud and on-prem with Google Cloud Virtual Private Clouds,” Ines Envid, Google Product Manager, and Neha Pattan, Software Engineer, will show you how to build a sandbox to run your cloud workloads alongside on-prem applications, as well as how to integrate with GCP’s machine learning, big data and storage services.

More and more, building cloud applications means building mobile applications. In “Security first for a mobile first strategy,” director of Android security Adrian Ludwig discusses the multiple layers of protection that the Android platform provides to help keep business and personal information safe.

We do our part on the backend, but it’s up to you to write quality apps. In “Designing secure UX into your products,” Google senior developer advocate Mandy Waite discusses best practices you should follow when building apps and services, plus how Google protects against threats like malware and phishing attacks.

At a fundamental level, for many of our customers, keeping their business safe is rooted in protecting email. In “Trends in data security,” Gilad Golan, Google Director for Security and Data Protection, and Nicolas Lidzborski, Staff Software Engineer, describe our latest innovations in email security — and how you can apply those to your organization.

As an added bonus, we’re also offering a full-day security bootcamp before the show. Register now to reserve your spot, and see you at NEXT!

8 must-see sessions for application developers at Google Cloud Next ’17

By Chris Sells, Product Manager, Google Cloud

With 200-plus sessions to choose from at Google Cloud Next ‘17 on March 8 - 10, there’s a little bit of something for everyone. But if you’re an application developer coming to the show, here are a few sessions in particular that I recommend you check out.

The most popular application development platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is Java. If that describes your shop, be sure to check out "Power your Java workloads on Google Cloud Platform," with Amir Rouzrokh, Product Manager for all things Java on GCP. Amir will show attendees how to deploy a Spring Boot application to GCP, plus how to use Cloud Tools for IntelliJ to troubleshoot production problems.

In the past year, we’ve also made big strides supporting Microsoft platforms like ASP.NET on GCP. For a taste, check out Google Developer Advocate Mete Atamel’s talk “Take your ASP.NET apps to the next level with Google Cloud,” where he’ll cover how to migrate an ASP.NET app to GCP, how to work with our Powersehll cmdlets and Visual Studio plugins and how to tie into advanced GCP services like Google Cloud Storage, Cloud Pub/Sub and our Machine Learning APIs. Then there’s "Running .NET and containers in Google Cloud Platform" with Jon Skeet and Chris Smith, who will show you the next generation of OSS, cross-platform .NET Core apps running in Containers in Google App Engine and in Kubernetes.

Speaking of App Engine, here’s your chance to learn all about App Engine flexible environment, our next-generation PaaS offering. In "You can run that on App Engine?," Product Manager Justin Beckwith shows you how to easily build production-scale web apps for an expanded variety of application patterns.

We’re also excited to talk more about Apigee, the API management platform we acquired in the fall. At “Using Apigee Edge to create and publish APIs that developers love,” Greg Brail, Principal Software Engineer and Prithpal Bhogil, GCP Sales Engineer, will walk developers through how to use Apigee Edge and best practices for building developer-friendly APIs.

Newcomers to GCP may also enjoy Google Cloud Product Manager Omar Ayoub’s session, "Developing made easy on Google Cloud Platform", where we’ll provide an overview of all the different libraries, IDE and framework integrations and other tools for developing applications on GCP.

But the hottest application development topic at Next '17 is arguably Google Cloud Functions, our event-based computing platform that we announced in alpha last year. For an introduction to Cloud Functions, there’s "Building serverless applications with Google Cloud Functions" with Product Manager Jason Polites. Mobile developers should also consider "Google Cloud Functions and Firebase", marrying our mobile backend as a service offering with Cloud Functions’ lightweight, asynchronous compute.

Of course, that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to application development sessions. Be sure to check out the full session catalog, and register sooner rather than later to secure your spot in the most coveted sessions and bootcamps.

Googlers on the road: FOSDEM 2017

The new year is off to an excellent start as we wrap up the 7th year of Google Code-in, ramp up for the 13th year of Google Summer of Code, and return from connecting with our compatriots in the open source community down under at Linux.conf.au. Next up? We’re headed to FOSDEM, Europe’s famed non-commercial and volunteer-organized open source conference.

FOSDEM_logo.png
FOSDEM logo licensed under CC BY.

FOSDEM is hosted in Brussels on the Université libre de Bruxelles campus and runs the weekend of February 4-5. It’s a unique event in the spirit of the free and open source software and is free to the public. This year they are expecting 8,000+ attendees.

We’re looking forward to talking face-to-face with some of the thousands of former students, mentors and organization administrators who have participated in our student programs. A few of them will even be giving talks about their recent Google Summer of Code experience.

If you’d like to say hello or chat about our programs, you’ll be sure to find a Googler or two at our table. You’ll also find a number of Googlers in the program schedule:

Saturday, February 4th

2:00pm    Bazel: How to build at Google scale by Klaus Aehlig
3:25pm    Copyleft in Commerce: How GPLv3 keeps Samba relevant in the marketplace by Jeremy Allison

Sunday, February 5th

10:40am  gRPC 101: Building fast and efficient microservices by Ray Tsang
10:50am  Is the GPL a copyright license or a contract under U.S. law? by Max Sills
12:45pm  The state of Go: What to expect in Go 1.8 by Francesc Campoy
1:00pm    Analyze terabytes of OS code with one query by Felipe Hoffa (more info)
2:50pm    Like the ants: Turn individuals into a large contributing community by Dan Franc

See you there!

By Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office

Join the POSSE Workshop on Student Involvement in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software

Are you a university or college instructor interested in providing students with experience in real-world projects? Are you interested in supporting participation in humanitarian free and open source software (HFOSS)? If so, join the Professor's Open Source Software Experience (POSSE) workshop being held at Google’s San Francisco Office, April 20-22, 2017.

Over 100 faculty members have attended past workshops and there is a growing community of faculty members helping students learn within HFOSS projects. This three-stage faculty workshop will prepare you to support student participation in open source projects. In the workshop, you will:

  • Become part of the community of educators which involves students in HFOSS
  • Learn how to support student learning within real-world project environments
  • Motivate students and raise their appreciation of computing for social good
  • Meet and collaborate with instructors who have similar interests and goals

Workshop Format

Stage 1: Starts February 23, 2017 with online activities. These activities will take 2-3 hours per week and include interaction among workshop instructors and participants.

Stage 2: The face-to-face workshop will be held at the Google San Francisco office, April 20-22, 2017. Participants include the workshop organizers, POSSE alumni and members of the open source community.

Stage 3: Comprises online activities and interactions among small groups. Participants will have support while involving students in an HFOSS project in the classroom.

Please click here to learn more about the POSSE workshop in April.

How to Apply

To apply, please complete and submit the application by February 13th. Prior work with FOSS projects is not required. The POSSE workshop committee will send you a confirmation email to notify you of the status of your application by February 23rd, 2017.

Participant Support

POSSE is supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Google. NSF funding will provide two nights lodging and meals during the workshop. Travel costs will be covered up to $500. At this time,we can only support US-based faculty members. However, if you can support your own travel, please do submit an application!

Why is Google participating?

Google is participating in order to help educators overcome challenges identified in the POSSE workshop held last June, and to better support FOSS education in academia. We are very happy to host the first POSSE workshop located on the west coast of the United States.

See you in San Francisco this April!

By Helen Hu, Open Source Programs Office