FOSSASIA at Google Code-In 2016 Grand Prize Trip

This year FOSSASIA came up with a whopping number of GCI participants, making it to the top. FOSSASIA is a mentor organization at the Google Code-In contest, which introduces pre-university students towards open source development.

Every year Google conducts the grand prize trip to all the GCI winners and I represented FOSSASIA as a mentor.

FOSSASIA GCI winners and Mentor at Google Mountain View Campus.

Day 1: Meet and Greet with the Diverse Communities

We all headed towards the San Francisco Google office and had a great time interacting with members from diverse open source organizations from different parts of the world. I had some interactive conversations with the kids, on how they scheduled their sleep hours in order to complete the task and got feedback from the mentors from different time zones! I was also overwhelmed while listening to their interests apart from open source contributions.

“I am a science enthusiast, mainly interested in Computer Science and its wide range of applications. I also enjoy playing the piano, reading, moving, and having engaging conversations with my friends. As a participant in the GCI contest, I got the chance to learn by doing, I got an insight of how it is like to work on a real open-source project, met some great people, helped others (and received help myself). Shortly, it was amazing, and I’m proud to have been a part of it. ” Shared by one of our Winner Oana Rosca.

There were people from almost 14 different countries, in fact, FOSSASIA, as a team, was the most diverse group 🙂

Day 2: Award Ceremony

We had two winners from FOSSASIA, Arkhan Kaiser from Indonesia and Oana Rosca from Romania. There were 8 organizations with 16 winners. The award ceremony was celebrated on day 2 and each winner was felicitated by Chris DiBona, the director of the Google open source team.

Talks by Googlers

We had amazing speakers from Google who spoke about their work, experiences, and journey to Google. Our first speaker was Jeremy Allison, a notable contributor to “Samba” which is a free software re-implementation of the SMB/CIFS networking protocol. He spoke on “How the Internet works” and gave a deeper view of the internet magic.

We had various speakers from different domains such as Grant Grundler from the Chrome team, Lyman Missimer from Google Expeditions, Katie Dektar from the Making and Science team, Sean Lip from Oppia(Googler and Oppia org admin), Timothy Papandreou from Waymo and Andrew Selle from TensorFlow.

Day 3: Fun Activities

We had various fun activities organized by the Google team. I had a great time cruising towards the Alcatraz island.  Later we had a walk on the Golden Gate bridge. Here comes the fun part of the tour “the cruise dinner” which was the best part of the day.

Day 4: End of the trip

Oana, Arkhan and I gave a nice presentation about our work during GCI. We spoke about all the amazing projects under FOSSASIA. One cool thing we did is that we “Doodled” our presentation 🙂 Here are few images from the actual presentation.

The day ended well with loads of good memories and information. Thanks to the open source technologies and their availability along with a beautiful friendly community, these memories and connections will now remain for a lifetime.

Continue ReadingFOSSASIA at Google Code-In 2016 Grand Prize Trip
Read more about the article Apply for Your Free Stay during the FOSSASIA Summit 2017 with our 100 #OpenTechNights Program
FOSSASIA OpenTechSummit 2016. http://2016.fossasia.org/

Apply for Your Free Stay during the FOSSASIA Summit 2017 with our 100 #OpenTechNights Program

The FOSSASIA Summit 2017 takes place from Friday March 17 – Sunday March 19 at the Science Centre Singapore. We are now inviting Open Source contributors to apply for a free stay in a Singapore hostel and a free ticket to the event. All you have to do is convince us, that you are an awesome Open Source contributor!

The details

Developers from all over the world are joining the FOSSASIA Summit. We want to connect established and new Open Tech contributors alike. Therefore FOSSASIA is supporting the Open Source community to join the event by offering 100 free nights stay at a hostel in the centre of Singapore and a free ticket to the event. All you have to do is to fill in the form with information that convinces us that you are an awesome contributor in the Open Source community.

The Process

Step 1: Please fill in our form here before February 17 (23:00 Singapore Time).

Step 2: We will get back to you at latest within 3 days after the deadline if you are selected. But, also we are choosing very convincing applicants on an ongoing basis. So, the earlier you apply the higher your chances to get a free stay might be.

Step 3: The selected applicants will need to confirm their itinerary and tickets before March 1st to re-assure their free stay in Singapore.

Expectations of Participants – Share what you learn

1. Please support volunteers, speakers and participants at the event. Let’s bring all this good spirit of sharing Open Technologies and learning together!

2. Help to reach out to participants who cannot join us at the event. For example make some tweets, share what you learn on social media, publish photos and put up blog posts about the summit.

Our Team

Our team of “100 #OpenTechNights” – Hong Phuc Dang, Mario Behling, and Roland Turner – is excited to meet you in Singapore!

Apply Now

Apply for a free stay with #FOSSASIA #OpenTechNights and participation at the FOSSASIA Summit 2017 now here!

More Information

More updates, tickets and information on speakers also on our #OpenEvent system: https://eventyay.com/e/45da88b7/

Continue ReadingApply for Your Free Stay during the FOSSASIA Summit 2017 with our 100 #OpenTechNights Program

Introducing new Developers to Your Project

You may want to introduce new developers into your project. This is either to get help or to allow the community to guide the project. In this blog post, I want to present how I believe an introduction can be designed.

(1) A Landing Page

For the knitting projects, I have designed a landing page, knitting.fossasia.org. It features all related projects with links to documentation and source code as well as a short summary what it is about. You can read more about the landing page in this blog post.

The idea is to to add short snippets of information that allow new developers to explore all available options to enter the projects. This may be contact information, documentation and videos.

(2) Setup Instructions

Especially for the projects I worked on, I created a introduction videos on how to set up your development environment. This could have been in text form, too.

The problem for new developers is often that the start takes a long time. Instead of focusing on the issue they would like to solve, it sometimes takes several hours to set up the environment with lots of possibilities to make mistakes.

In order to speed up the development environment setup, you can provide additional information. The CoderDojo Zen platform has its own landing page for new developers and a description of the steps to take to setup the development environment. In the case of the knitting projects, we have YouTube video tutorials which show the necessary steps.

(3) Introduction Events

You can participate in events to show your projects to other people.

With the knitting projects, we will participate at the Maker Faire Berlin 2016.There may be local user groups where you can present the work and the learnings from them.

Google Code-In is an excellent opportunity to allow new young developers to add code to your projects and document them. You can apply as a mentor and add tasks. A first task for beginners may be to get the project running on their computer. Another task could then be to either use it in a special way and document it or to solve an issue which is easy enough.

In the following Google Summer of Code your project can be used again. You can apply as a mentor for your project and help other students to work on what you left behind.

Summary

I listed some ways I will perform to get the projects I worked on into the community. I hope they may have been an inspiration for other people who read this. If you like to contribute new ways, you can comment 🙂

Continue ReadingIntroducing new Developers to Your Project

New Landing Page for FOSSASIA Knitting Projects

Now, FOSSASIA has a new landing page for the different knitting projects, knitting.fossasia.org.

The objective of this page is to ease starting development on knitting projects. As such, it is listed on the labs site of FOSSASIA. The FOSSASIA labs give you the opportunity to get into development of open-source projects in the FOSSASIA community.

The site features a list of projects related to knitting – software and hardware projects. They all have Github issues attached and you can access them via a waffle link. There is a unified view on all issues for convenience.

In the section below, you can see how you can contribute. For translations, no coding is required but it is useful to know the Github pull-request workflow.

The next step is to start coding without understanding much of the inner workings of the project. This can be done by optimizing some metrics like code quality, health and coverage. This way, new developers setup the code base, get familiar with the code and have an easy first contribution.

To start implementing features, we have a list of issues attached. they are organized in waffle projects. They have tags like “easy” or “hard” to guide the choice. Easy issues can be worked on by developers who want to get into the code base and do not require much knowledge of the inner workings of the project.

In the bottom, there is also a community section that shows how to get in touch and a section for related work. This sections is extremely important as it allows us to expand the community to users, get inspiration. This can be seen as a repository for human interconnections. If a developer leaves the project, all commits remain. However, the connections to the people leave. In order to keep these connections, this section is created. It features a list of other sites, wiki pages and places t read and inform oneself.

Summary

Creating a community around project is new to me. I did this the first time in the Flappy-SVG project. With the knitting.fossasia.org site, I hope to see a community evolve around the knitting projects in FOSSASIA.

Continue ReadingNew Landing Page for FOSSASIA Knitting Projects

FOSSASIA Code-In Grand Prize Winners Gathering at Google Headquarter

FOSSASIA was thrilled to be selected once again as a mentor organisation of Google Code-In (GCI) 2015 – a contest to introduce pre-university students (ages 13-17) to open source software development. Together with 13 other orgs we reached out to 980 students from 65 countries completed a total number of 4,776 tasks. As a part of our participation, I got a chance to present FOSSASIA at the Grand Prize Winners trip.

FOSSASIA Team, photo by Jeremy Allison
FOSSASIA Team, photo by Jeremy Allison

GCI 2015 Awards Ceremony

28 grand prize winners, their parents along with one mentor from each participating organisation were invited to a trip to the Bay Area as a reward to their hard work during the last GCI program. Students had a chance to meet with mentors and to interact with their fellow students from other projects, enjoyed a few days in San Francisco and received many cool gifts/swags from Google.

Chris DiBona and Jason Wong, photo by Jeremy Allision
Chris DiBona and Jason Wong, photo by Jeremy Allision

Chris DiBona – Director of Open Source at Google – a super busy man who was so kind to spend his morning personally congratulated each single student in front of his/her parent. I do believe enjoy what you are doing and get recognition for your work is the best gift ever and to be able to share it with your family is even better. Thanks Google for celebrating the open source culture.

Meet, learn and share

I was very impressed by the level of knowledge and abilities of all the 28 students. They are young, enthusiastic and inspiring. Thanks to all the parents for believing and supporting the kids in pursuing their open source journey.

Group photo by Jeremy Allison
Group photo by Jeremy Allison

It was wonderful to meet our two FOSSASIA GCI students for the first time. Jason grew up in the States, seemed a bit reserved while Yathannsh from India was very outspoken. They both were very new to open source when they joined the program and now have become active contributors and very eager to learn more. Three of us had a team presentation on FOSSASIA labs and our achievement from GCI 2015. Jason expressed his wish to go on as a mentor for the next GCI.

Jason and Yathannsh
Jason and Yathannsh

I had several interesting conversations with the parents who finally understood why their kids were on the computers all the time. About 14% of the parents are working in IT and very aware of open technology. The rest was super excited to learn about various open source projects. Many said to me they would love to have their second son/daughter to join the program as well.

The mentor group had a few discussions on pros and cons, how to improve and maximize the outcome of the program, and ways to keep students engaging afterwards. I learned a lot from other orgs and also shared FOSSASIA workflow and guidelines with them. The 7 weeks of GCI was an amazing experience for me and my team. I must give our FOSSASIA mentors credit for their incredible efforts. It was truly a pleasure to work with Mario, Sean, Mohit, Praveen, Nikunj, Abhishek, Jigyasa, Dukeleto, Manan, Saptaks, Aruna, Rohit, Arnav, Diwanshi, Martin, Nicco, Sudheesh, Samarjeet, Harsh, Luther, Jung and many more.

mentors
GCI 2015 – 14 Org Mentors, photo by Jeremy Allison

The Fun

It was the best field trip ever! The program was carefully planned: Meeting with Google engineers, a tour of the Google campus, a day of sightseeing around San Francisco and much more.

Segway Tour

I was my first time on a Segway and I loved it, so cool! Thanks Stephanie for encouraging me to try this. It is never too late to learn something.

Segway by the bay
Segway by the bay

Afternoon walk over the Golden Gate Bridge

Sanya and I could have completed the entire bridge but.. because of our slow male mentors we only made it halfway through. To all my geek friends out there – Please do more exercises!

On Golden Gate Bridge
On Golden Gate Bridge
Walking on the bridge, photo by Florian Schmidt
Walking on the bridge, photo by Florian Schmidt

Yacht Dinner Cruise

This was the highlight for many of us: sailing along the bay, relaxing time on the water, beautiful landscape, nice chats and yummy food.

Photo by Jeremy Allison
Photo by Jeremy Allison
Ladies pose, photo by Jeremy Allison
Ladies pose, photo by Jeremy Allison
with Cat Allman, photo by Jeremy Allison
with Cat Allman, photo by Jeremy Allison

Thank you organisers!

We just couldn’t thank Stephanie enough for her hard work and the extreme energy not only to GCI but also to the whole open source community and especially her care for us all during our trip. I was amazed by the level of details that been brought in: additional medication, sunscreen, chocolate tips, gift card, travel guide, luggage storage, special diet etc.

Stephanie Taylor, GCI program manager, photo by Jeremy Allison
Stephanie Taylor, GCI program manager, photo by Jeremy Allison

Last but not least thank to the lovely Mary, kind Helen, cool Eric, friendly Josh, awesome photographer Jeremy and of course my favorite Cat Allman for another unforgettable experience!

Links

Photos: https://goo.gl/photos/htCKY4yJooX9ZSNBA

Google Code-In: developers.google.com/open-source/gci/

Google Summer of Code: developers.google.com/open-source/gsoc/

FOSSASIA Labs: http://labs.fossasia.org/

Continue ReadingFOSSASIA Code-In Grand Prize Winners Gathering at Google Headquarter

How to join the FOSSASIA Community

We often get the question, how can I join the community. There is no official membership form to fill out in order to participate in the Open Tech Community. You simply start to contribute to our projects on GitHub and you are already a member. So, let’s work together to develop to develop social software for everyone!

The FOSSASIA team welcomes contributors and supporters to Free and Open Source Software. Become a developer, a documentation writer, packaging maintainer, tester, user supporter, blogger or organize events and meetups about our projects.

Women in IT discussion in the community

Here are some ideas how we can collaborate

Download our Open Source applications, install them and use them

The first step of joining a project is always to download the software and try it out. The best motivation to support a project is, if the project is useful for yourself. Check out our many projects on github.com/fossasia and our project social media Open Source search engine on github.com/loklak.

Show your support and ★star FOSSASIA projects

Help to motivate existing contributors and show your support of FOSSASIA projects on GitHub. Star projects and fork them. Doing something that people like and that helps people is a great motivation for many.

Learn about best practices

We have formulated best practices for contributing to Open Source to help new contributors to get started. Please read them carefully. Understanding our best practices will help you to collaborate with the community and ensure your code gets merged more quickly.

Subscribe to news

Subscribe to the FOSSASIA Newsletter to stay up to date on new software releases, events and coding programs here on the main page.

Read the blogs and support users on the mailing list

Learn from Open Tech articles on our blog that are written by developers, contributors, volunteers, and staff of companies supporting the FOSSASIA network. Sign up for the FOSSASIA Mailing List and keep reading our blog at blog.fossasia.org.

Follow us on Social Media

Show us you interest in FOSSASIA’s Open Technology and keep up to date on new developments by following us on Twitter and retweeting important updates: twitter.com/fossasia

And, become a member on social networks like Google+ and Facebook and connect with other contributors:
* Facebook www.facebook.com/fossasia/
* Google+ plus.google.com/108920596016838318216

Join and support the FOSSASIA network at community events

Set up a booth or a table about FOSSASIA at Open Source community events! There are many events of the open source community all over the world. The core team of FOSSASIA is simply not able to attend all events. You can support the cause by making the project visible. Register as a member of the FOSSASIA community at events, set up an info point and showcase Free and Open Source projects. Check out for example FOSSASIA event calendar calendar.fossasia.org or our meetup group in Singapore: meetup.com/FOSSASIA-Singapore-Open-Technology-Meetup

Translate our projects and their documentation

Do you speak more than one language? Most Open Tech projects are 100% volunteer translated, which means you can be part of a translation team translating software and documentation thousands of people will use. Start now and check out our GitHub repository.

Mini Debconf Participants in Saigon

Continue ReadingHow to join the FOSSASIA Community

Join the FOSSASIA Community Network

The FOSSASIA.net project is an initiative to bring the Asian Free and Open Source Software and OpenTech community together and foster cooperation. We make it easy to find communities and projects on a map with links to the websites, social media channels, and automatically updated info from community blogs.

Communities store their information decentrally anywhere on the web – on their server, a blog, or git service. FOSSASIA.net collects information through a stardardized API file on the web. You can generate the API file with the FOSSASIA API generator on our website. Then you add your community to the FOSSASIA network website. Simply add the link of your API file to our list of communities on github.

FAQ

How does it work?
You need to provide a file for our API and add the file to our communities repository. Then fill in the link to your API on our directory on github. That is it!

Where can I store my file?
We prefer that you store your file in our github repository of communities: https://github.com/fossasia/fossasia-communities. It is also possible to store it anywhere on the web, where it is publicly available, e.g. in a blog or CMS page as an attachment. However the github repo is the preferred method currently.

How about updating my file?
If you need to update your links, just upload a new file in the same location.

How do I start?
To make it easier, we created a FOSSASIA API Generator, where you can simply fill in your data here: http://api.fossasia.org/generator When you are finished copy the info from the form on the top right into an empty file or use the download button.

How do I find Geolocation data of my community?
You can find this data from OpenStreetmap. OpenStreetmap shows maps using a URL of the form: www.openstreetmap.org/#map=[Zoom Level]/[Latitude]/[Longitude] So go to www.openstreetmap.org and zoom to the area of your community. For example, if you are zoom into Mumbai, you will get the URL http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=11/19.0715/72.9499 Then 19.0715 will be the latitude and 72.9499 the longitude.

What is an API?
In computer programming, an application programming interface (API) is a set of routines, protocols, and tools for building software applications. An API expresses a software component in terms of its operations, inputs, outputs, and underlying types. An API defines functionalities that are independent of their respective implementations (e.g. It does not matter what CMS is used), which allows definitions and implementations to vary without compromising each other. Compare: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application_programming_interface

Links

* Website http://fossasia.net

* Map http://fossasia.net/map/map.html

* FOSSASIA Community Network Tweets https://twitter.com/fantwk

Continue ReadingJoin the FOSSASIA Community Network

New York City Hack Manhattan Hackerspace Meetup

Hackerspaces are community-operated physical spaces, where people can meet and work on their projects. Hackerspaces around the world are listed on the hackerspace wiki. Yesterday I had the chance to visit Hack Manhattan.

Hack Manhattan is operated as a non-profit community hackerspace in New York City. Equipments includes a mini-mill, sewing machines, soldering irons and reflow tools and several 3D printers. Members work on all kinds of projects. Many are in electronics, 3D printing, and software, but we also brew beer, keep bees on the roof, and garden. I was very happy to meet Real John Connor, Stephen Lynch, and Dave Reeves and learn about their work.

I hope we see more hackerspaces in Asia and I would love to support people who are starting them. Let me know on twitter about your hackerspace! http://twitter.com/hpdang

Links

Hack Manhattan: https://hackmanhattan.com

Hackerspaces on the Web: http://hackerspaces.org

Continue ReadingNew York City Hack Manhattan Hackerspace Meetup

Community Networks and Freifunk: Help to translate

Community networks extend the model of Open Source to networks and enable people to share services and Internet connections locally. I translated a video of the Freifunk community to Vietnamese. Versions in different languages are available. Join us and translate the video! The translation pad is here http://pad.freifunk.net/p/Spot2013

 

Links:

Freifunk: http://blog.freifunk.net

OpenWrt: http://openwrt.org

Continue ReadingCommunity Networks and Freifunk: Help to translate