Tag Archives: gci

These 27 organizations will mentor students in Google Code-in 2018

We’re excited to welcome 27 open source organizations to mentor students as part of Google Code-in 2018. The contest, now in its ninth year, offers 13-17 year old pre-university students from around the world an opportunity to learn and practice their skills while contributing to open source projects–all online!

Google Code-in starts for students on October 23rd. Students are encouraged to learn about the participating organizations ahead of time and can get started by clicking on the links below:
  • AOSSIE: Australian umbrella organization for open source projects.
  • Apertium: rule-based machine translation platform.
  • Catrobat: visual programming for creating mobile games and animations.
  • CCExtractor: open source tools for subtitle generation.
  • CloudCV: building platforms for reproducible AI research.
  • coala: a unified interface for linting and fixing code, regardless of the programming languages used.
  • Copyleft Games Group: develops tools, libraries, and game engines.
  • Digital Impact Alliance: collaborative space for multiple open source projects serving the international development and humanitarian response sectors.
  • Drupal: content management platform.
  • Fedora Project: a free and friendly Linux-based operating system.
  • FOSSASIA: developing communities across all ages and borders to form a better future with Open Technologies and ICT.
  • Haiku: operating system specifically targeting personal computing.
  • JBoss Community: a community of projects around JBoss Middleware.
  • KDE Community: produces FOSS by artists, designers, programmers, translators, writers and other contributors.
  • Liquid Galaxy: an interactive, panoramic and immersive visualization tool.
  • MetaBrainz: builds community maintained databases.
  • MovingBlocks: a Minecraft-inspired open source game.
  • OpenMRS: open source medical records system for the world.
  • OpenWISP: build and manage low cost networks such as public wifi.
  • OSGeo: building open source geospatial tools.
  • PostgreSQL: relational database system.
  • Public Lab: open software to help communities measure and analyze pollution.
  • RTEMS Project: operating system used in satellites, particle accelerators, robots, racing motorcycles, building controls, medical devices.
  • Sugar Labs: learning platform and activities for elementary education.
  • SCoRe: research lab seeking sustainable solutions for problems faced by developing countries.
  • The ns-3 Network Simulator Project: packet-level network simulator for research and education.
  • Wikimedia: non-profit foundation dedicated to bringing free content to the world, operating Wikipedia.
These 27 organizations are hard at work creating thousands of tasks for students to work on, including code, documentation, design, quality assurance, outreach, research and training tasks. The contest starts for students on Tuesday, October 23rd at 9:00am Pacific Time.

You can learn more about Google Code-in on the contest site where you’ll find Frequently Asked Questions, Important Dates and flyers and other helpful information including the Getting Started Guide.

Want to talk with other students, mentors, and organization administrations about the contest? Check out our discussion mailing list. We can’t wait to get started!

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Google Code-in 2018 is looking for great open source organizations to apply

We are accepting applications for open source organizations interested in participating in Google Code-in 2018. Google Code-in (GCI) invites pre-university students ages 13-17 to learn by contributing to open source software.

Working with young students is a special responsibility and each year we hear inspiring stories from mentors who participate. To ensure these new, young contributors have a solid support system, we only select organizations that have gained experience in mentoring students by previously taking part in Google Summer of Code.

Organization applications are now open and all interested open source organizations must apply before Monday, September 17 at 16:00 UTC.

In 2017, 25 organizations were accepted – 9 of which were participating in GCI for the first time! Over the last 8 years, 8,108 students from 107 countries have completed more than 40,000 tasks for participating open source projects. Tasks fall into 5 categories:
  • Code: writing or refactoring.
  • Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more.
  • Outreach/Research: community management, outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions.
  • Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality.
  • Design: graphic design or user interface design.
Once an organization is selected for Google Code-in 2018 they will define these tasks and recruit mentors from their communities who are interested in providing online support for students during the seven week contest.

You can find a timeline, FAQ and other information about Google Code-in on our website. If you’re an educator interested in sharing Google Code-in with your students, you can find resources here.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Announcing Google Code-in 2018: nine is just fine!

We are excited to announce the 9th consecutive year of the Google Code-in (GCI) contest! Students ages 13 through 17 from around the world can learn about open source development by working on real open source projects, with mentorship from active developers. GCI begins on Tuesday, October 23, 2018 and runs for seven weeks, ending Wednesday, December 12, 2018.

Google Code-in is unique because, not only do the students choose what they want to work on from the 2,500+ tasks created by open source organizations, but they have mentors available to help answer their questions as they work on each of their tasks.

Getting started in open source software can be a daunting task for a developer of any age. What organization should I work with? How do I get started? Does the organization want my help? Am I too inexperienced?

The beauty of GCI is that participating open source organizations realize teens are often first time contributors, so the volunteer mentors come prepared with the patience and the experience to help these newcomers become part of the open source community.

Open source communities thrive when there is a steady flow of new contributors who bring new perspectives, ideas and enthusiasm. Over the last 8 years, GCI open source organizations have helped 8,108 students from 107 countries make meaningful contributions. Many of these students are still participating in open source communities years later. Dozens have gone on to become Google Summer of Code (GSoC) students and even mentor other students.

The tasks that contest participants will complete vary in skill set and level, including beginner tasks any student can take on, such as “setup your development environment.” With tasks in five different categories, there’s something to fit almost any student’s skills:
  • Code: writing or refactoring
  • Documentation/Training: creating/editing documents and helping others learn more
  • Outreach/Research: community management, marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions
  • Quality Assurance: testing and ensuring code is of high quality
  • Design: graphic design or user interface design
Open source organizations can apply to participate as mentoring organizations for in Google Code-in starting on Thursday, September 6, 2018. Google Code-in starts for students October 23rd!

Visit the contest site g.co/gci to learn more about the contest and find flyers, slide decks, timelines, and more.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

My first open source project and Google Code-in

This is a guest post from a mentor with coala, an open source tool for linting and fixing code in many different languages, which participated in Google Code-in 2017.

About two years ago, my friend Gyan and I built a small web app which checked whether or not a given username was available on a few popular social media websites. The idea was simple: judge availability of the username on the basis of an HTTP response. Here’s a pseudo-code example:
website_url = form_website_url(website, username)
# Eg: form_website_url('github', 'manu-chroma') returns 'github.com/manu-chroma'

if website_url_response.http_code == 404:
  username available
else:
  username taken
Much to our delight, it worked! Well, almost. It had a lot of bugs but we didn’t care much at the time. It was my first Python project and the first time I open sourced my work. I always look back on it as a cool idea, proud that I made it and learned a lot in the process.

But the project had been abandoned until John from coala approached me. John suggested we use it for Google Code-in because one of coala’s tasks for the students was to create accounts on a few common coding related websites. Students could use the username availability tool to find a good single username–people like their usernames to be consistent across websites–and coala could use it to verify that the accounts were created.

I had submitted a few patches to coala in the past, so this sounded good to me! The competition clashed with my vacation plans, but I wanted to get involved, so I took the opportunity to become a mentor.

Over the course of the program, students not only used the username availability tool but they also began making major improvements. We took the cue and began adding tasks specifically about the tool. Here are just a few of the things students added:
  • Regex to determine whether a given username was valid for any given website
  • More websites, bringing it to a total of 13
  • Tests (!)
The web app is online so you can check username availability too!

I had such a fun time working with students in Google Code-in, their enthusiasm and energy was amazing. Special thanks to students Andrew, Nalin, Joshua, and biscuitsnake for all the time and effort you put into the project. You did really useful work and I hope you learned from the experience!

I want to thank John for approaching me in the first place and suggesting we use and improve the project. He was an unstoppable force throughout the competition, helping both students and fellow mentors. John even helped me with code reviews to really refine the work students submitted, and help them improve based on the feedback.

Kudos to the Google Open Source team for organizing it so well and lowering the barriers of entry to open source for high school students around the world.

By Manvendra Singh, coala mentor

A galactic experience in Google Code-in 2017

This is a guest post from Liquid Galaxy, one of the organizations that participated in both Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in 2017.

Liquid Galaxy, an open source project that powers panoramic views spanning multiple computers and displays, has been participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) since 2011. However, we never applied to participate in Google Code-in (GCI) because we heard stories from other projects about long hours and interrupted holidays in service of mentoring eager young students.

That changed in 2017! And, while the stories are true, we have to say it’s also an amazing and worthwhile experience.

It was hard for our small project to recruit the number of mentors needed. Thankfully, our GSoC mentors stepped up, as did many former GSoC students. We even had forward thinking students who were interested in participating in GSoC 2018 volunteer to mentor! While it was challenging, our team of mentors helped us have a nearly flawless GCI experience.

The Google Open Source team only had to nudge us once, when a student’s task had been pending review for more than 36 hours. We’re pretty happy with that considering we had nearly 500 tasks completed over the 50 days of the contest.

More important than our experience, though, is the student experience. We learned a lot, seeing how they chose tasks, the attention to detail some of them put into their work, and the level of interaction between the students and the mentors. Considering these were young students, ranging in age from 13 to 17, they far exceeded our expectations.

There was one piece of advice the Google Open Source team gave us that we didn’t understand as GCI newbies: have a large number of tasks ready from day one, and leave some unpublished until the halfway point. That ended up being key, it ensured we had enough tasks for the initial flood of students and some in reserve for the second flood around the holidays. Our team of mentors worked hard from the moment we were accepted into GCI to the moment we began to create over 150 tasks in five different categories. Students seemed to think we did a good job and told us they enjoyed the variety of tasks and level of difficulty.

We’re glad we finally participated in Google Code-in and we’ll definitely be applying next time! You can learn more about the project and the students who worked with us on our blog.

By Andreu Ibáñez, Liquid Galaxy org admin

A year full of new open source at Catrobat

This is a guest post from Catrobat, an open source organization that participated in both Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in last year.


Catrobat was selected to participate in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) for the sixth time and Google Code-in (GCI) for the first time in 2017, which helped us reach new students and keep our mentors busy.

We tried something new in 2017 by steering GSoC students toward refactoring and performance, rather than developing new features. Implementing a crash tracking and analysis system, modularizing existing code, and rewriting our tests resulted in more lines of code being deleted than added – and we’re really happy about that!

This improved the quality and stability of oursoftware and both students and mentors could see progress immediately. The immediacy of the results kept students engaged - some weeks it almost seemed as if they had been working 24/7 (they weren’t :)! And we’re happy to say that most are still motivated to contribute after GSoC, and now they’re adding code more often than they are deleting it.

Although new features are exciting, we found that working on existing code offers a smooth entry for GSoC students. This approach helped students assimilate into the community and project more quickly, as well as receive rapid rewards for their work.

The quality improvements made by GSoC students also made things smoother for the younger, often less experienced GCI students. Several dozen students completed hundreds of tasks, spreading the love of open source and coding in their communities. It was our first time working with so many young contributors and it was fun!

We faced challenges in the beginning – such as language barriers and students’ uncertainty in their work – and quickly learned how to adapt our processes to meet the needs (and extraordinary motivation) of these new young contributors. We introduced them to open source through our project’s app Pocket Code, allowing them to program games and apps with a visual mobile coding framework and then share them under an open license. Students had a lot of fun starting this way and mentors enjoyed reviewing so many colorful and exciting games.

Students even asked how they could improve on quality work that we had already accepted, if they could do more work on it, and if they could share their projects with their friends. This was a great first experience of GCI for our organization and, as one of our mentors mentioned in the final evaluation phase, we would totally be up for doing it again!

By Matthias Mueller, Catrobat Org Admin

Google Code-in 2017: more is merrier!

Google Code-in Logo
Google Code-in (GCI), our contest introducing 13-17 year olds to open source software development, wrapped up last month with jaw-dropping numbers: 3,555 students from 78 countries completed an impressive 16,468 tasks! That’s 265% more students than last year - the previous high during the 7 year contest!

These students spent 7 weeks working online with 25 open source organizations, writing code, writing and editing documentation, designing UI elements and logos, conducting research, developing videos teaching others about open source software, as well as finding (and fixing!) hundreds of bugs.

General Statistics

  • 65.9% of students completed three or more tasks (earning a Google Code-in 2017 t-shirt)
  • 17% of students were girls
  • 27% of the participants from the USA were girls
  • 91% of the students were first time participants

Student Age

Participating Schools

Students from 2,060 schools competed in this year’s contest. Many students learn about GCI from their friends or teachers and continue to spread the word to their classmates. This year the 5 schools with the most students completing tasks in the contest were:

School Name Number of Student Participants Country
Dunman High School 140 Singapore
Sacred Heart Convent Senior Secondary School 43 India
Indus E.M High School 27 India
Jayshree Periwal International School 25 India
Union County Magnet High School 18 United States

Countries

We are pleased to have 7 new countries participating in GCI this year: Bolivia, Botswana, Guinea, Guyana, Iceland, Kyrgyzstan, and Morocco! The chart below displays the ten countries with the most students completing at least 1 task.


In June we will welcome all 50 grand prize winners to the San Francisco Bay Area for a fun-filled trip. The trip includes the opportunity for students to meet with one of the mentors they worked with during the contest. Students will also take part in an awards ceremony, meet with Google engineers to hear about new and exciting projects, tours of the Google campuses and a fun day exploring San Francisco. 

Keep an eye on the Google Open Source Blog in the coming weeks for posts from mentoring organizations describing their experience and the work done by students.

We are thrilled that Google Code-in was so popular this year. We hope to continue to grow and expand this contest in the future to introduce even more teenagers to the world of open source software development. 

Thank you again to the heroes of this program: the 704 mentors from 62 countries that guided students through the program and welcomed them into their open source communities.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Code-in Team

Announcing the Winners of Google Code-in 2017

Google Code-in (GCI) 2017 was epic in every regard. It was a very, very busy 7 weeks for everyone - we had 3,555 students from 78 countries completing 16,468 tasks with a record 25 open source organizations!

Today we are excited to announce the Grand Prize Winners and Finalists with each organization. The 50 Grand Prize Winners completed an impressive 1,739 tasks between them while also helping other students.

Each of the Grand Prize Winners will be awarded a four day trip to Google’s campus in northern California to meet with Google engineers, meet with one of the mentors they worked with during the contest, and enjoy some fun in the California sun with the other winners. We look forward to meeting these winners in a few months!

Grand Prize Winners

The Grand Prize Winners hail from 12 countries, listed by first name alphabetically below:
Name Organization Country
Aadi Bajpai CCExtractor India
Aarnav Bos OpenWISP India
Abishek V Ashok FOSSASIA India
Aditya Giri OpenWISP India
Akshit Dewan XWiki United States
Albert Wolszon Wikimedia Poland
Andrew Dassonville coala United States
Arav Singhal MovingBlocks India
Arun Pattni XWiki United Kingdom
Aryaman Agrawal Systers Community India
Bartłomiej Rasztabiga OpenMRS Poland
Carol Chen Sugar Labs Canada
Chandra Catrobat Indonesia
Chirag Gupta The Mifos Initiative India
Cynthia Lin Zulip United States
Erika Tan Systers Community United States
Eshan Singh MetaBrainz India
Euan Ong Sugar Labs United Kingdom
Fawwaz Yusran OpenMRS Indonesia
Grzegorz Stark Apertium Poland
Hiếu Lê Haiku Vietnam
Jake Du LibreHealth United States
Jatin Luthra JBoss Community India
Jeff Sieu BRL-CAD Singapore
Jerry Huang OSGeo United States
Jonathan Pan Apertium United States
Jude Birch Catrobat United Kingdom
Konrad Krawiec Ubuntu Poland
Mahdi Dolatabadi BRL-CAD Canada
Marcin Mikołajczak Ubuntu Poland
Marco Burstein Zulip United States
Mateusz Grzonka LibreHealth Poland
Matthew Katz The Mifos Initiative Canada
Mehant Kammakomati SCoRe India
Nalin Bhardwaj coala India
Naveen Rajan FOSSASIA Sri Lanka
Nikita Volobuiev Wikimedia Ukraine
Omshi Samal Liquid Galaxy Project India
Owen Pan Haiku United States
Padam Chopra SCoRe India
Palash Taneja CloudCV India
Pavan Agrawal CloudCV United States
Sheik Meeran Ashmith Kifah Drupal Mauritius
Shiyuan Yu CCExtractor China
Sunveer Singh OSGeo India
Tanvish Jha Drupal India
Tarun Ravi Liquid Galaxy Project United States
Thomas O'Keeffe MovingBlocks United States
Vriyas Hartama Adesaputra MetaBrainz Indonesia
Zhao Wei Liew JBoss Community Singapore

Finalists

And a big congratulations to our 75 Finalists from 20 countries who will receive a special hoodie to commemorate their achievements in the contest. They are listed alphabetically by organization below:
Name Organization Name Organization
Alexander Mamaev Apertium Shamroy Pellew MetaBrainz
Robin Richtsfeld Apertium Aleksander Wójtowicz MovingBlocks
Ryan Chi Apertium Jindřich Dítě MovingBlocks
Caleb Parks BRL-CAD Nicholas Bates MovingBlocks
Lucas Prieels BRL-CAD Jyothsna Ashok OpenMRS
Mitesh Gulecha BRL-CAD Matthew Whitaker OpenMRS
Aditya Rathore Catrobat Tomasz Domagała OpenMRS
Andreas Lukita Catrobat Alan Zhu OpenWISP
Martina Hanusova Catrobat Hizkia Winata OpenWISP
John Chew CCExtractor Vidya Haikal OpenWISP
Matej Plavevski CCExtractor Ethan Zhao OSGeo
William CCExtractor Neev Mistry OSGeo
Adam Štafa CloudCV Shailesh Kadam OSGeo
Adarsh Kumar CloudCV Emily Ong Hui Qi Sugar Labs
Naman Sood CloudCV Koh Pi Rong Sugar Labs
Anu Dookna coala Sanatan Chaudhary Sugar Labs
Marcos Gómez Bracamonte coala Adhyan Dhull SCoRe
Wonsang Chung coala Gaurav Pandey SCoRe
Kartik Goel Drupal Moses Paul SCoRe
Sagar Khatri Drupal Fidella Widjojo Systers Community
Tanish Kapur Drupal Valentin Sergeev Systers Community
Aditya Dutt FOSSASIA Yuyuan Luo Systers Community
Saarthak Chaturvedi FOSSASIA Janice Kim The Mifos Initiative
Yash Kumar Verma FOSSASIA Muhammad Rafly Andrianza The Mifos Initiative
Bach Nguyen Haiku Shivam Kumar Singh The Mifos Initiative
Đắc Tùng Dương Haiku Daniel Lim Ubuntu
Xiang Fan Haiku Qazi Omair Ahmed Ubuntu
Anhai Wang JBoss Community Simran Ubuntu
Divyansh Kulshreshtha JBoss Community David Siedtmann Wikimedia
Sachin Rammoorthy JBoss Community Rafid Aslam Wikimedia
Adrien Zier LibreHealth Yifei He Wikimedia
Miguel Dinis LibreHealth Akash Chandrasekaran XWiki
Vishwas Adiga LibreHealth Siddh Raman Singh XWiki
Shruti Singh Liquid Galaxy Project Srijan Jha XWiki
Kshitijaa Jaglan Liquid Galaxy Project Freddie Miller Zulip
Surya Tanwar Liquid Galaxy Project Priyank Patel Zulip
Enjeck Mbeh Cleopatra MetaBrainz Steven Hans Zulip
Kartik Ohri MetaBrainz

GCI is a contest that the Google Open Source team is honored to run every year. We saw immense growth this year, the seventh year of the contest, both in the number of students participating and the number of countries represented by these students. 

Our 730+ mentors, the heart and soul of GCI, are the reason the contest thrives. Mentors volunteer their time to help these bright students become open source contributors. Mentors spend hundreds of hours during their holiday breaks answering questions, reviewing submitted tasks, and welcoming the students to their communities. GCI would not be possible without their patience and tireless efforts.

We will post more statistics and fun stories that came from GCI 2017 here on the Google Open Source Blog over the next few months, so please stay tuned!

Congratulations to our Grand Prize Winners, Finalists, and all of the students who spent the last couple of months learning about and contributing to open source.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source

Googlers on the road: FOSDEM 2018

The Google Open Source team is currently enjoying summer weather in Sydney at Linux.conf.au, but soon we return to winter weather and head to Brussels for FOSDEM 2018. FOSDEM is a special event, famous for being non-commercial, volunteer-organized, and free to attend. It’s also huge, attracting more than 5,000 attendees.

FOSDEM logo licensed CC BY 2.0 SE.
This year FOSDEM is particularly special as it falls on top of the 20th anniversary of the open source movement and its steward, the Open Source Initiative. (In case you’re wondering, this September will mark the 35th anniversary of the free software movement.) We’re looking forward to celebrating the occasion!

You’ll find us in the hallways, at satellite events, and at our table in the stands area. You’ll also find some Googlers in the conference schedule, as well as folks sharing their experience of the most recent Google Summer of Code and Google Code-in.

If you’d like to say hello or chat, swing by our table in Building K. The highlight of our trip is meeting hundreds of the thousands of students and mentors who have participated in our programs!

Below are the Googlers who will be giving presentations:

Saturday, February 3rd
12:30pm  Google’s approach to distributed systems observability for Go by JBD (also at 2:30pm)
3:05pm   Testing and Validating distributed systems by Holden Karau

Sunday, February 4th
10:20am  Regular Expression Derivatives in Python by Michael Paddon
11:30am   Advocating For FOSS Inside Companies a panel including Max Sills
3:00pm    Your Build in a Datacenter by Jakob Buchgraber
4:00pm    Accelerating Big Data Outside of the JVM by Holden Karau

Hope to see you there!

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source

Wrapping up Google Code-in 2017

Today marks the conclusion of the 8th annual Google Code-in (GCI), our contest that teaches teenage students through contributions to open source projects. As with most years, the contest evolved a bit and grew. And it grew. And it doubled. And then it grew some more...
These numbers may increase as mentors finish reviewing the final work submitted by students.
Mentors from each of the 25 open source organizations are now busy reviewing the last of the work submitted by student participants. We’re looking forward to sharing the stats.

Each organization will pick two Grand Prize Winners who will be flown to Northern California to visit Google’s headquarters, enjoy a day of adventure in San Francisco, and meet their mentors and Google engineers.

We’d like to congratulate all of the student participants for challenging themselves and making a contribution to open source in the process! We’d also like to congratulate the mentors for surviving the unusually busy contest.

Further, we’d like to thank the mentors and the organization administrators. They are the heart of this program, volunteering countless hours creating tasks, reviewing student work, and helping students into the world of open source. Mentors teach young students about the many facets of open source development, from community standards and communicating across time zones to version control and testing. We couldn’t run this program without you!

Stay tuned, we’ll be announcing the Grand Prize Winners and Finalists on January 31st.

By Josh Simmons, Google Open Source