[kde-community] Google Code-In

[Valorie Zimmerman]

GCi has been announced. It will be pretty much the same rules as last
year. The Google Code-in 2014 contest will run from December 1, 2014
to January 19, 2015, roughly 7 weeks.

According to https://developers.google.com/open-source/gci/

Google Code-in is a contest for pre-university students (e.g., high
school and secondary school students ages 13-17) with the goal of
encouraging young people to participate in open source, and over the
last four years there have been 1575 students from 78 countries that
completed tasks in the online contest.

For many students the Google Code-in contest is their first
introduction to open source development. For Google Code-in we work
with open source organizations, each of whom has experience mentoring
students in the Google Summer of Code program, to provide "bite sized"
tasks for participating students to complete. Students gain real world
experience working on an open source project and can put the skills
they have been learning in the classroom to use in a open source
project that can touch millions of lives.

The tasks are grouped into the following categories:

* Code: Tasks related to writing or refactoring code

* Documentation/Training: Tasks related to creating/editing documents
and helping others learn more

* Outreach/Research: Tasks related to community management,
outreach/marketing, or studying problems and recommending solutions

* Quality Assurance: Tasks related to testing and ensuring code is of
high quality

* User Interface: Tasks related to user experience research or user
interface design and interaction

Tasks generally take students 3-5 hours to complete. Students earn one
point for each task completed. Students will receive a certificate for
completing one task and can earn a tee shirt when they complete three
tasks. At the end of the contest each of the open source organizations
will name five (5) students as their finalists and these finalists
will also earn a hooded sweatshirt. From their five (5) finalists,
each organization will name two (2) grand prize winners for their
organization based on the students' comprehensive body of work.

We need to have a goodly number of tasks ready when we apply, and
every task must have a mentor willing to monitor the student and sign
off on their work when they are done. As those who have mentored in
this even before can tell you, it is exhilarating, exhausting, and
very rewarding - both for you, and your project.

However, we also realize that this is holiday time for many people,
and not everyone likes to deal with young people, or short tasks. For
those of you who want to mentor, please be sure you are subscribed to
the KDE-Soc-Mentor list, and ping us in the #kde-soc irc channel if
your subscription is not yet accepted. This is a closed list for
mentors only -- no students allowed.

Stephanie said:

This year we will have 10-12 open source organizations work with the
students as mentoring orgs. All organizations that have participated
in a previous Google Summer of Code are eligible to apply. ... The
main thing is we want orgs that can be patient with the students and
who are interested in helping 13-17 year olds learn about open source
development.

Applications will open Monday, October 27th (after the GSoC Reunion)
and will close at 19:00 UTC Monday, November 10th.

Please speak up if you are interested in helping to administer the
contest, or mentor some tasks. Talk to your teams, and see if you have
some small tasks you need done - testing, refactoring, documentation,
videos, artwork, articles, analyses, and research. Students can even
comb through bugzilla and test old bugs to see if they are still
valid. Be creative!

Valorie